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Posts with tag: tagging | Return to BloggersBlog.com Homepage
Flickr Offers Geotagging
 Flickr announced that have added Geotagging to Flickr photos. Now Flickr photos can be tagged to indicate where individual photographs were taken. Flickr is offering a screencast that helps people learn how to geotag photos and another helper screencast to teach people how to search for geotagged photographs. You can see Flickr's geotagged photos here on Flickr's map which Download Squad says is powered by the Yahoo Maps API.
Wikipedia defines Geotagging as "the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds, or images." The metadata can include latitude and longitude coordinates, altitude and names of places.
Geotagging is a new feature for Flickr but it isn't a brand new tool. Smugmug blogs that they starting offering geotagging support over a year ago. Zooomr is another photo sharing service offering geotagging. Services like Frappr allow users to share their location with others. Robert Scoble points to a geotagging mashup tool called BlockRocker. Some other popular geotagging tools can be found here on del.icio.us.
Posted on August 28, 2006
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The Confusing World of Tags
Tagging has made finding things easier but it is far from perfect. CNET's media blog explained why in an entry that shows how the tag for "Afghan" can be confused.
But in a panel entitled "Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting tag clouds for grandma" at the South by Southwest conference here, a panel discussion with more than 200 in attendance was the place for some of the most clued-in taggers and fans of folksonomies in the world to vent about how they find the technology sorely lacking for true usefulness.
In general, the conversation went, tagging is a wonderful tool, but often doesn't meet users' needs because as it stands today, it leaves out too much context: What does the tag "afghan" mean? Is it a dog, a blanket, someone from Afghanistan?
That means, the panelists and audience members argued, that while tagging offers the promise of fully contextual content, it can still be too hard for users to find what they want, or to re-find something they've bookmarked or manually tagged.
To techies tagging is not a very difficult concept but many bloggers still don't use tags. Some have still not heard about them and others bloggers don't know how to tag posts. Teal Sunglasses lists a few of the issues keeping bloggers from using tags.
The problem with tagging is that it requires the writer to manually tag their articles. This is a flawed requirement on any number of levels:
1) most users don't, won't, or have no idea what you're talking about.
2) humans are rotten at tagging.
3) humans are even more rotten at figuring out what tags OTHER people will look for the piece under.
A Topix.net post discusses this same issue.
On one hand tags work because they maximize participation with a simple user ask and the social use effects help rough standardization emerge around them.
But tags aren't a panacea, since they're excessively vulnerable to spam, and the items which should belong to the same categories will get different tags from different users. Which is it, "topixnet"? or "topix"?
An organized agreed-upon tagging system is needed but is it possible? Would it be something resembling the Dewey Decimal System to get everything at least under the correct subject. How would this be done? Would you have a special subject tag and then the rest of the tags would relate to the subject tag?
Others have discussed the Dewey Decimal system idea here, here, here and here. An organized tagging system will only work if everyone follows the rules which seems unlikely since many people blog in different ways and about different things -- and for different reasons. Another issue will be how to stop all the spam tags once they start arriving in droves.
Posted on March 15, 2006
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Tag Cloud Forecast: Partly Greedy
 1000Tags.com is new advertising gimmick based on the MillionDollarHomepage.com idea except it uses a tag cloud format instead of pixels. 1000tags.com is selling the tags in the cloud. Buyers can purchase a entire tag exclusively (most expensive option) or they can share the tag with others. You can also get a free tag. Tech Crunch thinks the idea will generate cash for the 1000tags.com creators.
1000Tags is different enough from MillionDollarHomePage that I think it will have a lot of sucess, too. They call it "the first commercial tag cloud". And that’s exactly what it it. You can purchase a tag, pay by the character and font size, and hope that a lot of traffic to your site is the result.
They are selling up to 1,000 tags. Tags can be exclusive (click the Star Wars tag), but cost significantly more, and they will only sell 50 of them. The remaining tags link to a results page with what appears to be an unlimited number of results
MDH is going to be difficult to duplicate -- they made $1 million and then even more by placing the remaining pixels on eBay. But 1000tags.com will see some ads too -- it should fill up with ad tags for cheap hotels, gambling and sex sites pretty quickly. More on 1000tags.com at Qumana, Make You Go Hmm, Get Real and Ben Barren's blog.
Posted on January 11, 2006
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