Library clips

At the end of a previous post I went a bit off topic and ended up with the idea of a Public RSS Aggregator Folksonomy.

Instead of adding content to a folksonomy like the many social bookmark services, the content is already there in a Public RSS Aggregator, with a folksonomy system intergrated all the users are doing is tagging this re-syndicated content.

So there are two ways of browsing the portal, the first way is by the collection of the author tags (blog categories from all the blog sources…these can be transported in an RSS feed via the ENT namespace or DC)…not sure how you would list them on the sidebar as a tag cloud or tag set (The Community Engine newsmastering example manages to transport categories of all sources so you can view categories/tags, via the tag cloud, within the portal…it would also be great if you could view all posts from one source within the portal).
The second way is by browsing the user tags.

So this is incorporating user-tags for the content, the next step would be to take all these user accounts, and tags and create a folksonomy.

Some websites, such as the BBC, have already experimented with allowing users to tag their content as an alternative to the author-defined tags or the taxonomy…there are also add-on systems such as FreeTag that you can intergrate into your website to serve this very function.

Every post would be represented in the author tag-set, if not more than once (as you can tag a post multiple times, and posts are tagged at the time of publishing the post), but every post might not be represented in the user-defined tag set as some posts might not ever be tagged by the users, so the user-tag set may always be incomplete.

Single blog (visitor tags)

At the single blog level, this is like saying, here is my blog, tag my posts if you like, then others can browse my blog by my categories, or by visitor tags, or even by machine tags, such as TagCloud.

I use the term “visitor tags” here as opposed to “user tags”, as people don’t have to login they can be anonymous, just like adding a comment.

But also “user tags” can be more than browsing the portal (as mentioned above) by user-defined terms, they can also be aggregated, along with user accounts, into a folksonomy. So now you can discover and share content (from the portal) as you do in a social bookmark service…ie. related tags, user accounts who bookmarked this URL, common URL’s, etc…

I haven’t surfed around to see if there is a plug-in for visitor tags for your blog…you can put a Feedster tag box on every post, so people can tag your blog posts, but these must be aggregated at Feedster, I think, it seems you can’t browse your blog by these visitor tags.

See Brian’s take on the limitations of visitor-tags, and how they compare to user-tags…and more.

To make it clear user-tags are tags applied to webpages by someone who owns a space (like at del.icio.us), whereas visitor-tags are totally anonomyous (you don’t have to be part of a system, all you do is add a tag to a random post, and see you later).

Integrating User tagging

Similar to BBC’s idea (click on a story to see the tag box) , a Public RSS Aggregator Folksonomy will need the person to login, so infact they will be adding user-tags and not visitor-tags…as mentioned earlier these user-tags can be used for more than just browsing the content by user keywords, the user accounts and all the tags can also be presented in a separate interface as a folksonomy. Unlike other social bookmark managers where you can add content and tag the content, in this example you are not adding content, it is already present, all you are doing is tagging…so every URL in the folksonomy will be from one of the source blogs in the Public RSS Aggregator…if there are only 10 source blogs, then you will only see 10 URL types in the folksonomy.

Now O’Reilly are taking a different approach, instead of getting users to add tags to their portal, they figure people are already adding tags to their content at del.icio.us, so they are exporting all the items with O’Reilly in the URL and the accompaning tags from del.icio.us, and adding that information to their portal so visitors can browse by user-tags.

InfoWorld have taken a different approach, the InfoWorld editors are adding their content to del.icio.us and tagging it, then doing some fancy processing to create related links for each item in their website…here is a great explanation.

This article mentions that museums in general often lack subject terms for objects, and figure that users would like to browse a collection by topic keywords. It would be an arduous and costly task to create a taxonomy and than back index the whole collection, also it points out that museums have different content, inturn context, so would the taxonomy be local, or according to similar topic museums, or all museums.
The decision was to trial visitor-tagging or more involved user-tagging, basically letting visitors browse the collection electronically and add tags as they see fit, this was also promoted as an educational experience. Once the tags are applied anything can be done with this content, maybe creating a folksonomy.

Also see my post on Open Tags