sociaLISe

While I enjoyed going through the list of items tagged with LIS9763 here are some issues that I had with the exercise:

Number of Tags
There are times when the title of the link gave me little insight into the content and this is where tags would come in and save the day. But if the user had only given the item one or two tags (LIS9763 and socialmedia) then it was pretty much back to square one. Luckily, as a class we understand the relevance of the tag ‘LIS9763′ but a random Delicious user would probably not find it very informative. It seemed that adding three to six tags was the way to go in order to adequately classify the information.

Compound “Words”
Compound words and hypenated words are a nightmare! Sadly I had to use them as well because that’s the only way Delicious would let us tag items. And it makes sense when you’re doing it, because you don’t have any other options, but, again, I’m thinking of someone ‘browsing’ through Delicious – how likely is it that he/she will be looking for ’21stcenturylibrarian’? The only reason I ended up using it was because it was a suggested tag; had it not been suggested I wouldn’t have considered using it as a keyword/tag.

I like Rules! (Sometimes…)
Tagging is really arbitrary and while I was occasionally puzzled at some of the tags I came across, I had more issues when I was trying to tag my bookmarks. Library vs. libraries? Librarian vs. librarians vs. librarianship? Internet vs. web vs. interweb? Tips vs. advice? Howto vs. tutorial? I know that tagging is a personal activity (at first) but it’s also a social activity so I wanted my tags to sound relevant to other users. And I’m sure that at the end of the day it won’t have a significant impact on the world of social bookmarking whether I use the singular or plural form, or a synonym – but I like rules and guidelines.

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Ultimately, I found crowdsourcing useful for seeing what other people are looking at and what they consider to be useful and relevant. In the case of this assignment it was particularly easy because we all used a common tag but had we not done so I’m almost certain I wouldn’t have come across anyone else’s bookmarks (anyone currently in LIS9763) because there are just so many ways to tag an item.

ETA
My favourite feature was the ability to see how many other people had also bookmarked a particular link as it gauged a link’s popularity/relevance/ease of searchability. It was also a little disheartening at times to learn that I wasn’t the first person to come across an awesome tidbit of information, but, hey, we’re all here to share, right?

After doing the readings and having worked on our group project here are a couple of (random) thoughts:

- This isn’t specific to social bookmarking; it’s more of a social software observation: tech skills matter. Take a look at our group blog post, in particular our issues with making our social bookmarking site, well, social. And if you haven’t had the chance to look at the Corrado and Fredrick article then check it out. It’s full of great tips but at the same time it’s a little daunting when MySQL and PHP and CSS keep coming up. There’s no rule that says that we’ve got to be familiar with various platforms and software, but wouldn’t it be helpful if we were? Web 2.0 has helped make things easier for the less technically inclined (*points at self*) and has helped level the playing field (to some extent) but I don’t want to get complacent when it comes to the techy part of techological things…

- I’m no cataloguer but I’ve got a secret love for controlled vocabulary. At times this made the project more challenging, and maybe even a little frustrating, so it was important to keep re-reading Mercado’s words:

This gives you an opportunity to observe a user-based classification, and learn what your users think your data is about, and possibly using that to your advantage to, say, improve your classification, or study how the patron mind works.

Searching by tags is really not that different from keyword searching. I love keyword searches, and natural language search functions – so why am I poo poohing user created tags? Probably because I’m still green enough to be snooty about such things. But we’ve got to keep reminding ourselves that it’s all about the user; if they can’t find or access information on their terms then what’s the point of all the work that we’re doing?