I struggled a bit with the concept of social tagging so typed 'social tagging' into the Technorati search box and found a wealth of links to blogs, sites and videos all eager to expound on the nature and use of social tagging.
What was even more surprising was the fact of how easy it was to find material on my topic of choice. To someonw who has staunchly championed the importance of controlled lists such as theLibrary of Congress Subject Headings as a means of ensuring targeted searches, I am surprised at how effective social tagging is. It is a far more targeted system than I gave it credit for. I have searched through Flickr, YouTube and and Technorati, using 'natural language', and I have been amazed at the relevance of the material that turned up. I can only conclude that my prejudice against 'unofficial lists' of terms is not altogether warranted. People seem to be instinctively tagging their work with keywords that other people use to search with. When I searched for 'word cloud' in Flickr, hoping to find a picture of one, I had several to choose from. The one I chose was a library word cloud containing Web 2.0 words.
What was even more surprising was the fact of how easy it was to find material on my topic of choice. To someonw who has staunchly championed the importance of controlled lists such as theLibrary of Congress Subject Headings as a means of ensuring targeted searches, I am surprised at how effective social tagging is. It is a far more targeted system than I gave it credit for. I have searched through Flickr, YouTube and and Technorati, using 'natural language', and I have been amazed at the relevance of the material that turned up. I can only conclude that my prejudice against 'unofficial lists' of terms is not altogether warranted. People seem to be instinctively tagging their work with keywords that other people use to search with. When I searched for 'word cloud' in Flickr, hoping to find a picture of one, I had several to choose from. The one I chose was a library word cloud containing Web 2.0 words.
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