- Prompted by What del.icio.us needs to do where Bill Ives wrote:
Putting my blog posts into del.icio.us also allows me to see who else tagged these posts to determine the ones that others found useful enough to tag in del.icio.us.
I tagged my own blog posts in del.icio.us to discover that the most tagged by others are What To Do On Behalf of Informal Learning? (8 others) and PLE as Retreat versus Productivity Suite (6 others). No surprise regarding the first. A bit of a surprise on the second other than that this post was picked up by the widely read Stephen Downes in OLDaily.
More interesting to me, as I looked at what others tagged when they tagged me, was noticing how several others use ‘People’ as a del.icio.us bundle, but then how syntax varied in the tags. I consistently tag as first-name underscore last-name (Donald_Duck), others skip the underscore (DonaldDuck), and at least one inverted the order (DuckDonald), which again highlights a challenge of gaining full value from a pure folksonomy approach.
3 April update: Another alternative from Folksonomy – Tagging Lessons Learned:
I’ve been experimenting with the surname:Link format with good results. All of my bookmarking sites (Diigo, MyWeb and del.icio.us) handle it okay. Flickr removes the colon from the tag – both when I add the tag and when I search for that tag – so it still functions nicely.
- Follow-ups from my first Quick Updates on 18 March:
- Tag Cloud Software. I created a text file from the first two months of my writing in this blog and gave TagCrowd (thanks to Chris Fletcher) and IBM’s Many Eyes (thanks to Jay Cross) a try against that dataset. Both gave better results than my misguided choice described on 18 March. Many Eyes is the more robust choice between the two. Both are challenged with the three word phrase “personal learning environment” until I manually changed the input file to use personal_learning_enviroment. More tinkering for me to do some day here with both.
- Resource Pages. If you read this via the site (contrast to a feedreader), you’ll see that I’ve published my IA (Information Architecture) resource page. Still pretty sketchy.
Shamelessly borrowing from Dave Pollard’s “Open Thread” format (example for 11 March), I’m going start to periodically post “Quick Updates” that will cover things I am working on, thinking about, reading, listening to, recently read, or tried. This may become a weekly ritual as Dave does. Or not. Let’ see.
- I’ve started work on ‘resource pages’ for the following topics:
- Information Architecture
- Personal Learning Environments
- Storytelling
These will be another baby-step towards making this site/blog the central component of own Personal Learning Environment or knowledge management system. For now I’m using WordPress pages; however, I may switch over to a wiki before long. I will publish as soon as they are just a bit closer to ready for prime-time.
- Last night I had a somewhat disappointing experience with ZoomClouds. What was I thinking? I had tagged the site based on seeing a ZoomCloud tag cloud on another learning community blog (I forget whose) weeks back. Although I don’t believe in tag clouds for navigation, I thought it might be useful for a self-check on my “aboutness.” My first disappointment was nicely covered in FAQ relative to looking at feed as a snapshot for just the last 10(?) posts doesn’t give a very good picture, even for a blog as new as mine. But…my big stand-out word was ‘Wiki’, which is to me a minor component of even the recent history. The much worst part was then clicking on the tags and getting Google Ads for ‘mature audience’ content that I would not want to be associated with and had nothing to do with the tag word. Scratch that one off the list.
- I’m dabbling with creating a comparison of social bookmarking options. I’m presently including del.icio.us, Furl, Fuzzzy, Mag.nolia and Scuttle. Just the work of briefly using the four others makes me less frustrated with del.icio.us than I was a few days back. Partly due to what I see as their own shortcomings, but mostly just the amount of work it takes to add a single site to potential five different bookmarking sites in order to gain real first-hand comparison with my own data and experience. Then via Google Alerts I find Bob Stumpel’s Bookmark 2.0 list that opens up the whole question of how many to look into. Oh my. To live my values I would like to get to using an Open Source application.
- I’m starting to watch the videos from the The 5th International Semantic Web Conference
- I’m reading CustomerCentric Selling, by Bosworth adn Holland (to assist with the day-job) and The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning, by Cal Wick et al.