Thing 8 - Tagging

Right, well I've added some more tags to my blog posts and discovered that I seem to be unconsciously adding '-ing' to the end of my labels. Thing 8 is a prime example - 'tagging' instead of 'tags'. If I had the time and inclination, maybe some kind of analysis of blog tags would be interesting to see how many other 23 Thingers favour my way of labelling. Unfortunately I have other things to do so this will have to stay unexplored!

Shirky's essay was very interesting. Personally when using the web I prefer to search and the idea of using Yahoo categories had never appealed to me. On the rare occasions that I used them, I had found them frustrating because I needed to think about how someone at Yahoo may have categorised something. It always felt like there was so much out there that I wasn't finding. I had never really sat down and thought about classifying or tagging web content before and about how digital content can be classified as being about more than one thing because it doesn't have to sit in just one place on a shelf. It feels quite liberating to look at it this way!

I like Ann Arbor District Library's idea of incorporating user generated tags alongside traditional access points in the OPAC. This gives people the option of using which method they are most comfortable with to find things. This seems like a good idea to me, especially as tags are likely become more and more widely used elsewhere.