Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web
I’ve recently read the book “Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web“, by Gene Smith, an interesting overview on the art of tagging. I would recommend it to whomever is interested in discovering what tags mean, and even to those experts willing to deal with tagging in depth. Next, I present a brief summary on the topics covered by this book:
- What is Tagging?: As an introduction, the book offers an interesting overview on tagging, letting you discover what it is and its advantages.
- The Value of Tagging: Why do people tag? Why does a website/intranet need a tagging system?
- Tagging System Architecture: You will learn that a tagging system involves users, resources and tags in it. Moreover, the relations between them and their features are also presented.
- Tags, Metadata, and Classification Systems Using tags as metadata, and its differences with a classical taxonomic system.
- Navigation and Visualization: Advantages of a tagging system for navigation and visualization of a website’s content, showing some new stuff like tag clouds. In this chapter, geotagging is also presented.
- Interfaces: Some tips on implementing a user-friendly interface for a tagging system. How to ease users to tag a resource, recommending or without recommending tags, how to separate tags (spaces, commas, etc.), and much more.
- Technical Design: Some technical tips, such as designing the database for a tagging system, and using the open-source tagging plug-in FreeTag to ease this work.
- Appendix A – Case Study: Social Bookmarking: A brief history and some other ideas on social bookmarking sites.
- Appendix B – Case Study: Media Sharing: Tagging for rich media, such as images and videos.
- Appendix C – Case Study: Personal Information Management: How to manage personal information with tags.
Strongly recommended!
Category: social-bookmarking, social-tagging, tagging
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