Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Web 2.0 Week 2 - Tagging, Folksonomies, and Technorati

Tagging and word clouds:
Tagging is just like labeling. We had to do this for our business' website so that any time someone searched for certain words, their search engine would pull up our site. For example, we tagged: karate, Chun Kuk Do, Chuck Norris, fitness, Yoga, Wholy Fit, exercise, The Woodlands, Magnolia, Spring, etc.

Wikipedia writes, "Tags are a "bottom-up" type of classification, compared to hierarchies, which are 'top-down'." I don't like word clouds very much. The relative size of the words in relation to how frequently they're searched is good, but I like things that are heirarchal, I like there to be more order and structure. It is a preference based on convergent thinking rather than divergent thinking.

Folksonomies:
A folksonomy is a system of collaboratively creating tags. This is the true bottom-up classification system created from social tagging. I see it as an anti-directory. I picture folksonomies as trees limbs branching out and directories as tree roots branching out downward.

Delicious is a folksonomy because it will collect and create a combined view of everyone's bookmarks or tags, the ones that have been made public. Here's a link to my Del.icio.us account. Click here.

Technorati:
Technorati is a search engine for blogs. It directly competes with Google and Yahoo, but it narrows itself to just blogs. I can't think of why I would need it since Google gets those results too.