Week 4 (Jun 14 - 21)

Learning 2.0 @ HKUST Week 4 Activities: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

How time flies? We are in Week 4 already!

In this week, we will learn about (I) Tagging and (II) Social Bookmarking. Tagging and social bookmarking are two major elements of Web 2.0, so are you ready?

I. Wat is Tagging?

Tagging is just a way of labeling something, such as a Website, a blog post. a photo, video and any other object. In Web 2.0, a tag is any user-generated keywords or phrases that helps organize Web content. By tagging things you group them together and make them easier to find.

Categories vs Tags - You may wonder what are the differences between categories and tags. VanFossen has discussed some similarities and differences between categories and tags (Source: Lorelle on Wordpress):

• Categories can have unique names. Tags need to be known names.
• Categories can have long wordy names. Tags should be short.
• Categories generate a page of posts on your page. Tags can do the same job, but often create a page of off-site post.
• Categories are not tags. Tags can be categories.
• Categories don't help search engines find information. Tags help search engines and tag directories catalog your site.
• Posts are usually fall into one or several categories. A single post can have as many tags as you want.
• Categories help visitors find related information on your site/blog. Tags help visitors find information on your site and on other sites.

(Click to enlarge)

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Tag Clouds

Tags are usually plain texts. To make tagging more interesting on Web 2.0, tag clouds are getting more popular. Tag clouds are "visual depictions of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site" (Source: Wikipedia).

To create tag cloud for your own blog and favorite sites, try Wordle or Tagcrowd. Insert an URL into one of these tag cloud generators, and you will get a nice image.

Tagging is part of the collaborative nature of Web 2.0. There are lots of Web 2.0 applications/tools including del.icio.us and Flickr that use tagging. Next, we will explore del.icio.us - a social bookmarking tool.

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II. Social Bookmarking --- Del.icio.us (Delicious)

Del.icio.us is one of the most popular "Social Bookmarking" tools. Just like the bookmarks you saved on your personal computer, Del.icio.us saves the addresses (URLs) of your favorite Webpages. More importantly, Del.icio.us keeps all your bookmarks online and you can get them from any computer, anytime and anywhere.

Another great feature about Del.icio.us is the flexibility of managing bookmark collection. Folders are usually used to organize the bookmarks in Internet Explorer (IE) or Firefox, but as the number of bookmarks is getting larger and larger, it becomes more difficult to manage them effectively. The ability to add tags to your bookmark in del.icio.us will definitely make it much easier to locate particular bookmarks. You can simply search by tags, and you don't have to maintain several bookmark collections in different browsers. Last but not least, you can also share any interesting bookmarks (Websites) with your friends on del.icio.us (Source: Del.icio.us).

Del.icio.us can be applied in many library contexts. For example, Kresge Library at Oakland University uses del.icio.us and tag cloud to represent many Website resources that Kresge's librarians have deemed useful for teaching and research. The MIT humanities library has also built a DVD collection on del.icio.us which make searching films more flexible and interesting. In addition to del.icio.us, there are many other social bookmarking tools such as CiteULike, Connotea and Diigo. Now, this is your turn to experiment with tagging and del.icio.us.

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Activities

The objective of this activity is to give you some examples working with tagging and del.icio.us.

Background

To make searching movie more fun in the Library, Kevin is working on a project and he needs your input to build a movie list on del.icio.us.

Activity 1

1. Go to http://delicious.com/hkustmovie and sign in with the following Yahoo account (username: hkustmovie, password: learning2.0).


2. Spend some time and play around with this page.
3. Open a new browser and find 1-2 movies in SmartCAT (http://catalog.ust.hk/catalog/smartcat.php)
4. Adding a movie title to del.icio.us is very straightforward. In SmartCAT, simply select "Delicious" in the Bookmark & Share toolbox.

5. The movie title and URL will be exported to del.icio.us. instantly Now you just need to insert the summary to the 'Notes' field (the summary is available in SmartCAT).
6. Provide as many tags as you want for the movies. Please also include HKUST-media as the common tag for all movies.
   (Note 1: Use "space" to separate tags (e.g.HKUST-media Comedy 2010); don't use "comma".)
   (Note 2: Tag can only be a single word, i.e. "fiction film" will generate two tags "fiction" and "film"; so use fiction-film or fiction_film)
7. Click 'Save' to finish the job.
8. To see the complete list of our movie collection, select Bookmarks > My Bookmarks on toolbar.
9. Feel free to add more tags for other movies. To add/change tags, select "Edit".
10. Lastly, click 'Sign Out' to quit del.icio.us and post the movie titles and your name in the below Comment box to inform Kevin. Thank you!

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Activity 2 (Optional)

If you would like to set up your own del.icio.us, you need to use a Yahoo account. Your current Gmail account does not work with del.icio.us.

You can create a new del.icio.us page for your own interest (e.g. Web 2.0). Besides adding a new bookmark, you can also browse and save other people bookmark onto your own del.icio.us. For example, enter "web2.0 tools applications" in the Search Delicious box on the upper right-hand corner will give you a list of Everybody's bookmarks about Web 2.0 tools/applications. You will also see (1) the number of bookmarks tagged by other users, and (2) the save button that allows you to copy bookmark of particular Webpage to your own del.icio.us.

That's still a lot to explore on del.icio.us. If you have any comments or questions, please contact Kevin or your team leaders. Happy learning and see you next week!!!