Tagging Gone (terribly) Wrong

Tagging items with keywords that are meaningful to us and assumedly to other online viewers sounds like a great idea - and it is. What could be better that helping like minded people find the same things we like, using the vocabulary that we share?

But...what about when tagging goes terribly wrong? There's a phenomenon called "protest tagging" where folks tag products, books, videos and anything else they can tag with purposefully misleading descriptions. The single most obvious example of this would be Ann Coulter's recent book, "Godless: the Church of Liberalism." Let the political rhetoric begin...

Take a look at "The Long Tail of Ann Coulter" [on LibraryThing] which details the popular - and very political - tagging of the book.

Here's another summary from Michael Huang's technology blog: “Ann Coulter's Godless shows up [on Amazon.com] as the #1 result, with 9 instances of 'poop'. Other top tags include: hateful (143), lies (101), propaganda (80), evil (73), fascist (64), hateful divisive political rhetoric (49), and horsecrap (48). What I find interesting about the tag "hateful divisive political rhetoric" is that 49 people all tagged it the same 4 words -- it's not "divisive political" or "hateful rhetoric" but "hateful divisive political rhetoric". I'd guess it likely that whoever tagged it "hateful divisive political rhetoric" probably also tagged it "horsecrap" too.” [Micheal Huang]

Yes, that's right - Amazon.com shows Ann Coulter's latest book ranked first under the search tag "poop".

LibraryThing has tried to examine the vialbility of tagging in, "When Tags Work and When They Don't".

Just to be fair - viewers of MySpace TV have also tagged Ann Coulter - she's in the top 10 search results for "pundit"!

Blogs, blogs, everywhere

Maybe you have started your own blog (lots of you have, congratulations!), or maybe you are just thinking about it. One way to get started is by reading other blogs. Certainly read those of your friends and colleagues, but there are so many more you might want to take a look at, visit regularly, add to a newsreader. (I know, I know, that's the next lesson.)
Anyway, here are some blogs for you to consider reading, commenting on, subscribing to.

It's official, libraries and blogging go together. Check out the Library of Congress blog.

The librarians aren't the only ones in Washington blogging. Yes indeed, here is The Hill's Congress Blog (where lawmakers come to blog).

This one is a wiki, but I just want to point out that lots of public libraries are blogging away.

Since you work in the library there is a good chance you love books. Even if you aren't into creating your own personal library on LibraryThing, you may want to get into the LibraryThing blog.

Stay on top of local happenings with Sticks of Fire.

You can also stay current on Tampa, and the world at large, by reading newspaper blogs. There are so many to choose from, here are blogs from The St. Petersburg Times, The Tampa Tribune, and the newspaper of record, The New York Times. What a wealth of information and conversation! More opinionated, and often more interesting, than the articles in the newspapers.

If you still want to know some more about this blog stuff, here are a couple of blog entries you can read.
How Blogs Work is an entry on a blog called How Stuff Works.
And you can Learn More about Blogs and Blogging on this entry into the Discovery Series on a blog called Library Stream.

Now get blogging!