The practice of adding 'tags' (as used for the title of this page) refers to the user-led activity of adding metadata/keywords to digital resources. Tagging resources is a well established concept among social software services, such as bookmarking services like del.icio.us and furl and picture sharing services like flickr. It is considered to be a useful device for both finding and organising objects. The application of this method is refered to as a folksonomy. At last year's Institutional Web Management Workshop a parallel session entitled Folksonomies: Metadata or Mess? explored tagging, its advantages and disadvantages and whether folksonomies have a role in an interoperable future. The consensus is that tagging objects, especially within an event environment like IWMW, has great potential for the collaborative creation of and sharing of resources.
This year the recommended tag for all content relating to the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006 is 'iwmw2006'. This tag can be used for all your bookmarks, blogs and images, for example:
This particular tag has been decided upon because it is short, self-explanatory (to those in the know) and scalable. The use of hyphens has been avoided for the main tag because some folksonomy sites (e.g. Flickr) allow you to add hyphens when tagging your digital objects but then strip them out for urls, meaning linking to them is not straight forward.
Speakers and facilitators may wish to bookmark urls for a session for collaborative working or sharing with delegates. If so the following format is recommended:
For example:
del.icio.us is the preferred storage service for those wishing to tag urls, but if you are more familiar with another bookmarking service then that can be used instead. A link to the tagged urls can, if wanted, be added from the facilitators abstract, as for example with Brian Kelly and Randy Metcalfe's abstract. Once URLs have been tagged then delegates can register for the RSS feed of specific sessions.
Tagging objects will allow us to use our resource in may different ways. One example of this is through the use of SuprGlu which 'brings the pieces of your web content together into one central place ' by syndicating RSS feeds. The IWMW2006 SuprGlu page is pulled from del.icio.us tags and the IWMW2006 RSS feeds.
Please note that the IWMW2006 SuprGlu Web site is aimed at providing a service before, during and immediately after the workshop. No long term access can be guaranteed.
Last modified: 29th May 2006
