2.0 Alphabet

is for Squidoo. Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses --single pages that highlight one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren't primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.

Squidoo's goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo's goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo's goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.
Read more about Squidoo at The SquidLens.

Check out Squidoo's Library 2.0 Lens.

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 2 (letters N-Z) were originally published in Information Today 24.10 (Nov 2007): p.15(2).

2.0 Alphabet

is for reddit, where users submit links to content and then vote on the links, so the most popular items bubble to the top. Similar sites are Digg.com and Newsvine. A study released in September 2007 by the Project for Excellence in Journalism showed a wide divergence in what the so-called "mainstream media" considers to be important and what "the masses" perceive as worthy of attention. This is proof.

"The site has discussion areas in which users may discuss the posted links and vote for or against others' comments. When there are enough votes against a given comment, it will not be displayed by default, although a reader can display it through a link or preference. Users who submit articles which other users like and subsequently "vote up" receive "karma" points as a reward for submitting interesting articles."[Wikipedia]

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 2 (letters N-Z) were originally published in Information Today 24.10 (Nov 2007): p.15(2).

Back on Topic

I know my post yesterday had nothing to do with the current topic but it was so good, hope you all took some time to explore.
Back on topic, tagging, here's an interesting post from the Free Range Librarian, Karen Schneider. She will be in town tomorrow over at TBLC presenting a class on writing for the web. I'm looking forward to it; I worked with Karen long ago on The Internet Filtering Assessment Project.

2.0 Books

Everyone's a cataloger...

"Tagging : People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web," by Smith, Gene.
Berkeley, CA : New Riders, 2008.

Tagging is fast becoming one of the primary ways people organize and manage digital information. Tagging complements traditional organizational tools like folders and search on users desktops as well as on the web. These developments mean that tagging has broad implications for information management, information architecture and interface design. And its reach extends beyond these technical domains to our culture at large. We can imagine, for example, the scrapbookers of the future curating their digital photos, emails, ticket stubs and other mementos with tags. This book explains the value of tagging, explores why people tag, how tagging works and when it can be used to improve the user experience. It exposes tagging's superficial simplicity to reveal interesting issues related to usability, information architecture, online community and collective intelligence. [Amazon.com]

"Everything is Miscellaneous : the Power of the New Digital Disorder," by David Weinberger. New York : Times Books, 2007.

Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.
In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.
From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think--and what you know--about the world. [Amazon.com]

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"!

It's all about me!

My delicious site is what I'm talking about. And it really is. It's got urls to things I might post on a blog one of these days, recipes I might cook someday, things and people I might need when I move one of these years, stuff I might buy as a gift for someone, or for myself, and so on. Lots of library 2.0 links. Anywhere I see something I want to come back to I just grab that url and put it on my delicious page. And as long as I tag it right I will be able to find it when I need it. There is much more that can be done with delicious, but I love the organized way it helps me keep track of things I might want to find again one day.