On Tagging (from the archive)
I taught a class on tagging for Vera Rhoads at the University of Maryland Graduate School back in 2006. It was an introductory-level presentation, aimed at covering the basics. Last year, I presented a similar presentation on classification, tagging and search. Continue reading »
Filed under Findability, Information Architecture | Comments OffSearch Presentation (from the archive)
I have given versions of this information retrieval talk for five or six semesters at Thom Haller’s USDA Graduate School class on Information Architecture. I always enjoy the class, since Thom attracts folks with an interesting range of experience. Continue reading »
Filed under Findability, Information Architecture | Comment (0)Switching from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia for bookmarking
I use del.icio.us to archive the things I’ve read for later retrieval or for sharing. I use it to help manage to torrent of information coming across my desk (or phone) through email and RSS. It acts like a sort of supplementary memory so can I focus on other things. And on the whole, I have been pretty happy with del.icio.us. It’s always been slow and its interface has always been poor. But it had a number of advanced and rewarding features that made it the only viable option for social bookmarking (more on this later). I tried a handful of other products over the last few years and I wasn’t impressed with any of them - certainly not impressed enough to go through the hassle of moving services. Until now.
I tried Ma.gnolia at least a year ago. Nobody was on it. It was basically a pretty del.icio.us without any substantive new features or interaction improvements over its competitor. It was not something I would switch to. At the time Del.icio.us was still the ugly king of bookmarking. Well, things have changed a bit in the intervening months and my assessment has changed along with them. Ma.gnolia is pretty cool after all and I have made the switch. Continue reading »
Filed under Findability, Personal | Comments (2)Tagging Tagging Tagging
I haven’t written anything substantive in months. Work, the holidays and so forth have kept me plenty busy. For a while now, I’ve been meaning to blog some of my thoughts on tagging. I’ve been gardening my tags for over two years now. I’ve watched others use del.icio.us and experimented with my own techniques. Two techniques I’ve tried are pre-coordinating and post-coordinating tags, which I describe briefly below.
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Collaborative Rank Top 100 del.icio.us Users
I broke into the top 100 del.icio.us users this week, according to CollaborativeRank. Not much else to say - I just thought it was interesting to see how I slowly worked up the rankings (I was originally near the bottom of the top 500).
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