Thing #10: Tagging and folksonomies

Delicious is a social bookmarking manager which allows you to bookmark a web page and add tags to categorize them.

Many people find that real power of Delicious is in the social networking aspect, which allows you to see how others have tagged similar links and also to discover other websites that may be of interest to you.

Managed user generated tags are often referred to as a folksonomy

You can think of it as peering into someone else’s filing cabinet to see how they organise things, but with this powerful bookmarking tool linking each filing cabinet helps to build an expansive knowledge network.

For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at Delicious and contribute some links and tags of your own.  Go to Delicious and find out how to install bookmarklets.

Coming next … technorati

Thing #9: Make a search engine

The aim of Thing #9 is to create your own search engine

Rollyo is a Yahoo!-powered search engine which allows you to register accounts and create search engines that retrieve results only from the websites and blogs you want to include.

You can also share your  engines with others and HTML is available to post a mini search box to your own website. With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines – called Searchrolls – and explore, save and personalize those created by others.

Rollyo requires no programming skills. A WISYWYG editor guides you through the process:

• Select up to 25 sites to include
• Add tags so your search engine can be found easily
• Choose a relevant category for the Rollyo directory
• Make your search engine private or public as you like

Let’s roll …

Thing #8: Be your own librarian

The aim of Thing #8 is to create a personal library of your books

Navigate to the librarything website and set yourself up with a new account. Then use the “Add books” tab to begin to add to your library.

LibraryThing is a social cataloguing web application for storing and sharing personal library catalogues and book lists.  You can catalogue personal collections, keep reading lists, post book reviews, and chat to other users who have the same books. After a user catalogues books, he or she can tag them, add/correct cover pictures, and use social features. When a book is tagged, it can be viewed when other users or books use that tag.

The primary feature of LibraryThing is the cataloguing of books by importing data from booksellers and libraries through Z39.50 connections.

Another feature, “Members with your books”, shows the names of other people with the 50 most similar libraries to yours. When viewing another member’s profile or library, the system shows how many (and which) books are shared between you.  

If desired, you can leave a (public or private) comment on another’s profile. One can also add the member as a friend, to a private watch list, or as an interesting library

Thing #7: Tag clouds

The aim of ‘Thing #7’ is to have some fun with Wordle, the tag cloud generator.

 A tag cloud is a visual depiction of topics (tags) on a website. Tag clouds are usually single words displayed in different fonts and colours to show the importance of each tag. The size of the text is reflected in the amount of times the word is used in the text box. If you use a word several times the size of that word will be bigger than words that appear less frequently.

Tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a related content so the choice of tags used is important and should clearly represent your topics and target audience.

Websites such as Flickr use tag clouds to enable users to find other images related to the tag. Users can see hot tags from the last 24 hours and the most popular tags of all time.

Task  – Create a tag cloud using Wordle

1. Go to the Wordle website: http://www.wordle.net

2. Click on ‘Create’

3. In the ‘Paste in a bunch of text’ section, type in as many words as you can that relate to your experience of 23 Things so far. To prevent two or more words being separated in the image, put the ~ (tilde character) between words that go together

4. Click on ‘Go’

5. Play around with the different formatting options available (Edit, Font, Layout and Colour)

6. Click ‘Save to public gallery’

7. Give the tag cloud a title and username, then click on OK

8. Copy the code displayed at the bottom of the page, and paste it in your blog along with your views on using tag clouds.

Read the FAQ section to read more about how to add the tag cloud image to your blog.

Internet librarian, Phil Bradley, also recommends Tagxedo, so you may like to play with that too