A graduate student from McGill contacted me recently to ask about my blogging practice with a focus on how I use categories within my blog. If you are curious too, this is my answer, edited for the blog format.
All in tags
A graduate student from McGill contacted me recently to ask about my blogging practice with a focus on how I use categories within my blog. If you are curious too, this is my answer, edited for the blog format.
The Tag, You're It panel discussion from SXSW Interactive has some good information on tagging. There are four panelists, including Thomas Vander Wal.
Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide's Neurolearning Blog give us some insight into blogging in "Blogs as Our Brains: Can We Escape Chaos?" They touch on a couple aspects of blogging and cognition that make things chaotic: tagging, learning preferences, and even organizational skills.
Rashmi Sinha has another nice piece on tagging, "A social analysis of tagging." I like the way Rashmi talks about the blurry line between the individual act of tagging and the social use of those tags.
The RSS Blog points to a new way to peruse your Flickr images with photoblogger. It is very much geared toward finding pictures, rather than browsing in the standard Flickr mode.
Joy London reminds us that To Classify is Human with a piece on taxonomies in law firms. It's not folksonomy vs taxonomy, it's both.
Thanks to far too much time on my hands, I have now hand-coded a tag cloud for this blog.
Rashmi Sinha put together "A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular)" that I found to be illuminating. The short version: tagging is a simpler process because it lets us annotate something with all the concepts that it fires in our brains. Categorization forces us to pick one of those concepts.
Interesting articles from Clay Shirky and David Weinberger on categorization and tagging. The articles have been out for a couple months, but it's useful to look at them in light of hearing the ideas bantered around.
Has anyone come up with a tagging tool for personal use? I'd love, for example, to be able to quickly retrieve all my photos with my wife in them, regardless of date or location.