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 #4: Photos, images and Flickr

The aim of ‘Thing 4’ is to explore Flickr and to think about how you might use images at work.

Flickr is a photo management website allowing you to upload, organise and share images online. Images can be uploaded from a variety of sources (including computers, mobile devices and the web) and can be displayed on the Flickr website, shown in RSS feeds or emailed to people.

Images can be displayed publicly or privately (for only select people to view). Descriptions and tags can be added to all photos uploaded.  A tag is a keyword that is assigned to the photo that allows users to find information related to the word used. The words beach and animal could be used as tags on Flickr if you had a photo displaying a donkey on a beach. Clicking on the tag could lead you to find other photos tagged with the same word.

Task: You’re going to create a Flickr account, upload some of your own photos, tag them and add descriptions to them.

1. Go to the Flickr website
2. Click on ‘Create Your Account’
3. Log in using an existing or creating a new Yahoo! ID account (it has to be Yahoo but an account can be set up at this stage if you do not already have one)
4. Choose a Flickr screen name
5. Personalize your profile (making sure to customize your Flickr URL)
6. Select ‘Upload your first photos’ and follow the on-screen steps to upload some of your photos
7. Add a description and a tag(s) to each image and click ‘Save’ at the bottom of the screen.
8. If you have friends that use Flickr, connect to their accounts using Step 3 on the welcome page.
9. Explore the Flickr website and find the different features available to you. Make sure that you read the Community Guidelines.
10. When you have finished exploring, make sure you ‘Sign Out’ of your account.

Further Task (optional)

You may wish to explore how to edit your images online using free image editing software packages such as Picnik.  You will need to connect your Flickr account to the Picnik site and try using the different editing tools available and save them back to Flickr.

Thing #3: RSS Feeds

The easy way to get your news and web updates

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and allows users to subscribe to multiple websites and have new content delivered automatically in one location, called an RSS reader or aggregator. Instead of visiting each website to check for new information, you simply check your reader, which has collected and organized the new content using RSS. When you set up an RSS reader and subscribe to content (feeds) of choice, you are creating customized information you want to read be it news, blog posts, journal articles, book and movie reviews, images, podcasts, etc.

There are a number of different readers available; we will use ‘Google Reader’, a free, simple, browser-based reader. You can then visit a website you like, click the RSS feed/subscription link (which is often indicated by the  icon above and add or paste the URL into your reader. Then, you visit your reader anytime you want to see what’s new at all of the sites you have subscribed to.

Task: Set up ‘Google Reader’ and subscribe to some feeds, perhaps a few of the other 23 Things blogs. After you have checked your Google Reader for a few days, write a reflective blog post telling about an item of interest from your reader.

You can use RSS feeds to keep up-to-date with news items, favourite blogs, journal articles, book reviews or updated items from any area of interest.

The URL below links to a short video explaining the essence of RSS.

http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

Launch event of 23 Things

On Monday 16th August Suzanne Enright, Director of ISLS, formally launched the 23 Things programme. You can watch her presentation online or read the script.

• Watch the presentation (10 mins; PC version)
• Read the script

In the beginning …

Early in 2010 several Academic Liaison Librarians  at the University of Westminster launched their subject based blogs – you can see these on the blogroll at the bottom of the page. This was the start of developing our approaches to social media.

On August 16th 2010 the 23 Things programme for all Information Systems and Library Services staff was officially launched by Suzanne Enright, Director of ISLS.

The 23 Things programme is a discovery programme of self-directed learning that will give you the chance to play with Web 2.0 technology over a number of weeks and see how we might use in our services.

Watch the presentation from the launch (link in previous post above) to find out more, sign up to the blog at the bottom of the page for further details and to receive your weekly tasks from the 23 Things programme.