Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In the past few chapters, we've spent a lot of time looking at various types of
resources you can trap, such as news, government, multimedia, and more.
And one thing I've repeated constantly is that if you want to generate que-
ries that are as narrow as possible, you must avoid being general; get speciic
by describing the topics you want to track as minutely as possible.
For one chapter—and only one chapter—I'm going to ask you to put that
advice aside.
Why? Because this chapter looks at how to monitor and trap tags and con-
versations. Tags are extremely general, and conversations have their own
idiom of searching. For each of these two types of searches, you have to take
a diferent perspective for your searching.
But it's worth it! Conversations are great for inding technical support,
news, and rumors about your topic of interest, and discussions of itness of
one item over another. Like blogs, conversations are also useful for quickly
inding discussions on current events. Tags are part of group-developed
“folksonomies” and can be an easy way to ind manageable numbers of
resources about general topics. I do tag searches for things I'd never dare to
use Google or even Feedster for.
his chapter looks at where to ind tags and conversations, and how to trap
them. It also provides some query-building advice so that you can get out
of the “narrow, narrow, narrow, speciic, speciic, speciic” groove for just
this one chapter.
The Tao of Tags
Tags are a relatively recent phenomenon on the Web. Of course, describing
a resource using keywords has been happening almost since Day One. But
having keywords used by a group of people gathered into a single folkson-
omy and then using that folksonomy as a browsing tool for the entire site is
relatively new.
a Folksonowhatnow?
A folksonomy, as we've already discussed, is like a taxonomy, a structure of
organization imposed upon a collection, whether that collection is topics,
 
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