Activity 6: Tagging, Folksonomies and Technorati

1. Tagging, folksomonies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

Photo from cambodiaforkidsorg

Tagging is an open and informal method of categorising that allows users to associate keywords with online content (webpages, pictures & posts). Tagging is completely unstructured and freeform, allowing users to create connections between data anyway they want.

In the past few weeks, we’ve already explored a few sites – Flickr and Blogger to name two – that allow users to take advantage of tagging. This week, in addition to exploring Technorati tagging, we want to also take at popular social bookmarking site del.icio.us (typed in as http://del.icio.us).

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking manager which allows you to bookmark a web page and add tags to categorise your bookmarks.  St. Michael’s staff should already be familiar with del.icio.us as it’s already a well-developed resource.

Many users find that the real power of del.icio.us is in the social network aspect, which allows you to see how other users have tagged similar links and also discover other websites that may be of interest to you. You can think of it as peering into another users’ filing cabinet, but with this powerful bookmarking tool each user's filing cabinet helps to build an expansive knowledge network.

For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look (or perhaps another look at) del.icio.us and learn about this popular bookmarking tool.

Discovery Resources:

• Otter Group del.icio.us tutorial (12 min video)

• Using del.icio.us tutorial on TeacherTube

• Us.ef.ul: A beginners guide to Del.icio.us

• Several Habits of wildly successful Del.icio.us users

• Our del.icio.us pages: Staff, Kinder, Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, Year 4, Year 4/5K, Year 5, Year 6, Parents, Library

Discovery Exercise:

1. View the 12 minute Del.icio.us tutorial or Using del.icio.us tutorial to get a good overview of its features.

2. Take a look around del.icio.us using the stmbstaff account.

3. Explore the site options and try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorise this reference?

4. Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool.

   Can you see the potential of this tool for your classroom or professional learning? Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

OPTIONAL: If you’re up to the challenge, create a del.icio.us account for yourself and discover how this useful bookmarking tool can replace your traditional browser bookmark list. You might even want to explore the del.icio.us network badge

Note: If you do setup a del.icio.us account, here’s a quick word about the del.icio.us Buttons. On PCs that have the toolbars locked down, these will install as options in your browser bookmarks. Use the “Post to my del.icio.us” link to add the current webpage to your account (you may need to log in). Use the “My del.icio.us” link to view your online account.

2. Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

So now that you’ve been blogging for a while, you might be wondering just how big the blogosphere is. Well, according to Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, the number of blogs doubles just about every 6 months with over 90 million blogs currently being tracked by the site.

Yes, these numbers are astounding, but as you’ve already seen for yourselves, blogging is so easy that these publishing tools are being taken advantage of by almost every industry, including libraries.

So how does a person get their blog listed as part of the blogosphere and how can you tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a Technorati search? The answer to the first question is that your blog is probably already being captured by Technorati due to the fact that you're already using Blogger, the most popular blogging tool. But if you want to join the party and have your blog officially listed on Technorati and also take advantage of the watchlist and other features, you’ll need to claim your blog yourself. As for tagging posts with Technorati tags? This is easy, too. All you need to do is add a little bit of HTML code to the bottom of your post and Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site.

There are a lot of new features that have been added to Technorati, including new ways to search for blogs. You can search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).  

Discovery Resources: 

• Technorati Tour – videocast of new features & new look

• Technorati Discover & Popular features

Discovery Exercise:

1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the BlogDirectory. Are the results different?
2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?

3. Create a blog post about your discoveries on this site.

There's a lot to explore.