Kim-23things

Tagging, tagging, tagging...

What can I say except that I love it. Sure, precision isn't always the best. When I try searching for "tiger" in Flickr for instance, I get images of: tigers, tiger butterflies, kids dressed up as tigers, Tiger Crow flowers, Tiger Cub Scouts, cats named tiger... You get the idea. But if you enter a specific search term, you can get pretty good results (Searching for "fishing cat" for instance yields much better results).

Why is tagging better than using folders for organization? Well it expedites searching and there is the whole concept of poly-hierarchy. Note that entries in this blog are tagged and the list of tags is listed on the right-hand side. Recently, when I gave a presentation on Web 2.0, I saved links to all of the sites I used as examples in my Keynote (Mac version of Powerpoint) to Del.icio.us. I tagged these sites by the name of the slides they appeared. Since we were in a computer lab, by providing everyone with a the url to my Del.icio.us site, they could quickly explore these sites for themselves. Below is a screenshot of my Del.icio.us site.


Photo Credits:
1. Tiger, 2. Untitled, 3. Dormindo igual um gatinho ...., 4. TigerLiliesBW.jpg, 5. Phoenix, 6. Tiger, 7. Sam's Halloween Costume, 8. Little Tiger & Mom, 9. eye of the tiger ..., 10. FOA: Drama 2, 11. After, 12. lonely tiger, 13. tiger, 14. Not available, 15. Not available, 16. Not available

There are so many neat library related blogs out there. A wonderful place to search these blogs is LISZEN. Remember Rollyo where one can "roll" all the websites they want to search? Well think of LISZEN as a Rollyo for library-related blogs. Currently, one can search over 750 blogs with LISZEN.

Some blogs that are searchable through LISZEN:
Reader's Advisory Knapsack
The Tao of Searching
User Education Resources for Librarians

And then there are the children's literature related blogs that I love:
Big A little a
The Kiddosphere at Fauquier
Kids Lit

Like I mentioned before, there are a lot of blogs out there. I think that is why specialized search engines such as LISZEN are so valuable. They help you to focus on the information that you need.