Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 6, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Tagging Discussion January 6, 2007 Beth started a cross-blog discussion about tagging and folksonomies, and I thought I’d weigh in. But is efficiency the most important thing?

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 7, 2007

Let's begin with big picture question that Gavin raised: What purpose do folksonomies serve? Gavin's post does a great job explaining the definitions and the advantages of a taxonomy over a folksonomy. He observes that folksonomies are in the early stages of development. How are they different from taxonomies? But give it time.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 6, 2007

Here's an example of "social search" in action. The report also includes an interview with David Weinberger who on his blog wonders how many taggers it takes for tagging to become a vital web resources? Even if just 1% of Web users tagged resources with some regularity, they would be creating handholds for the other 99%.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 22, 2005

Powerhouse Museum Electronic Fabric Swatch Book is a really cool project and an example of using a folksonomy as a way to address the reality that Museums often use subject categorizations that don't reflect the terms most people use when searching online. We have, since the launch, been inviting users to describe the swatches.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

I often talk about the idea of taking social technology out of the Web and putting it into physical museums as part of our exhibitions and programs. Why are folksonomies useful? Tags can allow people to search for artifacts via the real words they’d use to describe those things. This is brilliant on so many levels.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 24, 2007

The idea of "social search" -- how do we layer our social network on top of a search. Particularly if there is some momentum around using the NptechTag "folksonomy" to develop a more formal taxonomy. Is that a formalized taxonomy or not?

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 26, 2005

A great example of a folksonomy is ebay - where a laptop is a notebook. Some tools: A tool I hadn't seen was Zniff.com which is a search engine based on spurl tags - lets you do a search on the content of web pages. However, the benefit to exposing the popular terms is that a taxonomy emerges from the bottom up.

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