This document discusses the rise of tagging and folksonomies on the internet. It defines tagging as categorizing online content with descriptive keywords. Tagging allows users to personally organize content and make it findable for others. Many websites have adopted tagging, including Flickr, YouTube, blogs, and libraries. While tagging provides benefits like inclusiveness, discovery, and low costs, it also has limitations compared to controlled vocabularies, like lack of hierarchy, synonym control, and precision. Future developments may address these limitations through approaches like tag clusters and faceted tagging.

1. Libraries and the Hive Mind Folksonomies & Tagging Ellyssa Kroski Metropolitan New York Library Council June 17, 2008

2. Tagging on the Web

3. Tag Pronunciation: t ăg Transitive verb : 1. To categorize content online. 2. To add descriptive keywords, categories, or labels to online objects for future retrieval or findability. Inflected forms: tag·ging , tags

4. Motives For Future Retrieval Personal filing system Keywords to describe one bookmark out of 500 For Public Findability Blog Posts Photographs Videos

5. Basic Tagging Web 2.0 Participatory Web Read/Write Web One of the most basic ways that Web users can contribute to their own online experience DIY cataloging

6. Tagging Websites Social Media Websites Flickr, YouTube Social Bookmarking Websites del.icio.us, CiteULike Listmakers and Social Cataloging Websites 43 Things, LibraryThing Blogs 75 million blogs Nearly all blogging software supports tagging

7. del.icio.us

9. flickr

10. 43 Things

12. blogs

13. Tag Cloud

14. My Tag Cloud

15. My Tags Everyone Else’s Tags + = A Folksonomy

17. How popular is tagging? 28% of online Americans have tagged content such as photos, news stories, or blog posts on the Web. (Pew Internet & American Life). As of Feb 2007, 35% of all blog posts or 230 million were tagged according to Technorati. LibraryThing has over 384,000 users who have created 32 million tags. Flickr users have created over 10 million tags.

18. Mainstream Tagging Major Media Websites New York Times Tag Cloud

20. Mainstream Tagging Major Media Websites New York Times Tag Clouds Parenting Magazine Tag Clouds

22. Mainstream Tagging Major Media Websites New York Times Tag Clouds Parenting Magazine Tag Clouds New York Observer Tag Clouds Head Cloud

25. User-Tagging & Major Media

26. User-Tagging & Major Media

27. Amazon User-Tagging

28. Amazon User-Tagging

29. Gmail “Labels”

30. Facebook Tagging

31. RSS Feeds for Tags

32. RSS Feeds for Tags

33. Tag Searches

34. Tag Searches

35. Tagging Tools

36. Tagging Tools

37. Enterprise Tagging Behind the Firewall Intranet Bookmarking Dogear IBM social bookmarking community 6,000 employees Over 100,000 bookmarks

38. Dogear

39. Dogear

40. Dogear

41. Library Tagging

42. Danbury Public Library

43. Ann Arbor District Library

44. Ann Arbor District Library

45. Vanderbilt University Library

46. Carl A. Pescosolido Library

47. Tag Clouds on Library Websites

48. Subject Area Tagging

49. Subject Area Tagging

50. PennTags Community for students, faculty, and staff of Upenn. Bookmarks may include any Web content, OPAC records, items from SFX menu, items from video catalog, e-resources. Users can make their bookmarks private or public. Over 800 users, 13,000 bookmarks

51. PennTags

52. MTagger

53. LibMarks

54. Tags for Subject Guides

55. Tags for Subject Guides

56. ALA2007

57. ALA2007

58. ALA2007

59. Class Tags

60. Class Tags

61. Advantages?

62. Complementary Navigation

63. Inclusiveness Lift Elevator

64. Inclusiveness Newsagent News Stand News Newspapers

65. Currency Instantaneous Results Changes and/or additions to the taxonomy are added to the whole as quickly as they are made by the individuals.

66. Discovery Potential

67. Insight into User Behavior

68. Community The social nature of tagging engenders a sense of community. People have a common goal of cataloging their own information, but also sharing it with others. Offers a chance to view what people have tagged with a word, also how others categorized a particular resource. Involves the user and gets them invested in a website or brand.

69. Low Cost Low/No Cost alternative to a traditional taxonomy for cataloging Web-based resources. Massive rate of publication online between mediums such as blogs, wikis, etc. make a controlled vocabulary impossible. Library of Congress collection consists of 130 million items. The blogosphere alone produces more than 1.3 million items in the form of new blog posts every day. Flickr has a million photos uploaded every day.

70. Usability

71. Usability

72. Usability

73. Limitations?

74. Lack of Synonym Control

75. Lack of Hierarchy Folksonomies are flat, there are no parent-child relationships, no sub-categories. Makes for a less robust classification system than the traditional taxonomy. This limits the ability to add context to tags.

76. Lack of Precision Discovery Systems Folksonomies don’t have any hierarchical relationships, making searches less precise.

77. Lack of Recall Recall: the ability of a system to return all resources related to a topic. Because of lack of synonym control, a search of a folksonomy will not effect a complete results list because of the use of similar tags. A search for cat will usually not retrieve resources which have been tagged with kitten, feline, or tabby.

78. Susceptible to Spam Because these systems are open, spammers and/or unethical users out to corrupt a system could propagate bad tags.

79. The Future of Tagging Tag Clusters Tag Bundles Faceted Tags

80. Tag Clusters & Synonym Control

81. Tag Bundles & Personal Hierarchy

82. Faceted Tagging & Hierarchy

83. Next Gen Tagging Geographic Metadata Mobile Metadata which enables interaction with the world around us 2 D Barcode Tags

84. Flickr’s GeoTagging

85. Socialight’s Mobile Metadata

86. Semapedia

88. http://winksite.com http:// semacode.com

89. Ellyssa Kroski [email_address] Blogs: http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian http://infotangle.blogsome.com http://www.slideshare.net/ellyssa