Workshop ideas
One of the first things I think we need to do is generate some data on tagging. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to get a bunch of people to tag a bunch of stuff a mobtagging party or something. Invite your friends - it will be cool. You do want to be cool, don’t you.
The purpose of the flashburningmobtagsonomic workshop is to get a sense of how people tag things, how the act of tagging effect the taggers relation to the data, and the data’s relation to other data - how the data organizes itself).
I would like to implement a couple of iterations on this process.
- Free Form Tagging.
- Weighted tagging - manual weighting - like setting a rating in itunes.
- Weighted tagging - position sets the weight - first tag is more important than the second etc…. if two or more tags share the same weight, then place them in square brackets [ ]
Questions:
- What exactly should we have people tag? Books? Movies? Music? Recipes?
My feeling is we should stick to things that are easy enough to categorize on their own and something people may feel passionate about. - How many things do we need in our data pool?
- How many people should we get for the workshop?
This is an important question. My observations of last.fm guide my thoughts here. Last.fm have imposed a structure, (or set of rules) on the process of tagging(im sure similar models are used for othersite on books, movies and recipes) through the architecture of the site. ANOTHER set of rules is imposed on the ‘tagspace’ by the nature of music itself and the users participating on the site.
The content of the site, music, is organized by the following taxonomy. Artist>Album>Song. The music space can be explored at each level of granularity, and tags can be added to each of these ‘levels’. This allows users to create playlists of songs using unique tags ’summersongs123′ or organize vast music collections.
This is not the most common use of tags on last.fm
What I see MOST COMMONLY used as tags are the generes of music itself. This is information that is commonly found ALREADY in the metadata of the mp3 files, yet last.fm users spend time adding ‘rock’ and ‘indie’ keywords to their favorite bands.
Last.fm is a good example (IMO) of a site that combines taxonomy and tagsonomy, but i would also say its not working so well, or as well as it could.
Comment by draggin — January 14, 2006 @ 11:25 pm
I guess my point here is that the ‘free form tagging’ experiment may be a difficult situation to create because there are already default ‘rules’ for many content spaces.
I am thinking LINKS in general would be a bit better, because users would be able to have more freedom to ( and more responsibility to) come up with their own keywords that define the space, as a opposed to getting a free ride by tagging ‘inde’, ‘rock’, and ‘indie-rock’.
My second choice would be to tag photos, as these also are very personal artifacts that do not have alot of implied rules associated with them. Images were also related to some of our earlier work anthony, and might make a nice follow up.
Looking at tagging images or links also gives nod back to delicious and flickr as two of the earliest adopters of tagsonomy.
Comment by draggin — January 14, 2006 @ 11:49 pm
we might be able to make use of our educational connections and get one or several classes to participate in some studies with us. one from bcit, one from sfu, one from ubc?
Comment by draggin — January 14, 2006 @ 11:51 pm
[…] Voor een volgende workshop over mobtagging zou ik tenslotte een onderwerp als weighted tagging zelf ook nog wel interessant vinden. Some tags are more equal than others? […]
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