Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Resources That Use Tags
here's more being tagged than just Web sites—there are photographs, blog
entries, and even life goals! We discuss these later in the chapter, but for
right now let's start with the sites that tag general links.
Tagging seems to have started with
social bookmarking
, which involves a
group of people on the same site tagging their bookmarks and then describ-
ing them with a few words. Users could then explore who was using the same
tags, which bookmarks in the group were most popular, and so on. Get a
critical mass of people doing that, and voilà, you have a large set of resources
and a folksonomy. he grandpa of this kind of site is del.icio.us.
General tag sites
del.icio.us
If you're a longtime search-engine user, del.icio.us (del.icio.us) will drive
you a little crazy at irst, but I promise you'll get used to it. And it's worth it.
Instead of snippets and lots of information about search results, you oten
get just a resource name, relevant tags, and the time and date it was added.
Sometimes you get an additional line of description. You'll see what I mean
when you visit the front page of the site.
he reason it looks that way is because del.icio.us (which I call
Del
, for short)
is basically a huge bookmarks depository. When people add something to
their Del bookmarks, it's so they can ind it later, and less so they can learn
about cool new sites. However, I ind that the resource titles are generally
enough to give me an idea of what they're all about. I also ind that I can get
a heads-up on resources here that I don't normally ind anywhere else.
On Del's front page (
Figure 9.1
), the most recent resources are added. On
the right side is a list of the most popular tags.
What you will not see is a search box to ind tags. hat's okay. To ind items
tagged with the words you're interested in, use the following URL and
replace
keyword
with the tag you're interested in:
http://del.icio.us/tag/keyword
You have to get a little creative. First put aside all the really narrow queries
and do those general searches you've been dying to do. For example, tag-
ging services like Del are the only places where I trap for the extremely
general tags
“Google”
and
“Yahoo”
, and they work very well!
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