Tues - look at folk sites.

R - look at the messages in the phenom

Tammy Bobrowsky

connect w/rhet

• explaining how the message WORK is what we do

• folksonomies - the anti-taxonomies
  • natural, everyday lang
• taxonomy - controlled language to provide findability
  • lib uses taxonomy in subject heads
  • controlled, formal, all libs use same headings to find item

READER might come up with alternative terms from their reading

• moves away from controlled lang and lets readers devise their own schemes

Facebook: users play around with tags -

Exercise: go to a site you use and tag it. Ditto a CD/book/movie.

• ask: what did we tag as what?

Search for the site on delicious and compare tags

Look at delicious

• uses - bookmarks created by what the reader wants to do with them

• tagcloud - popularity
  • but gives a sample of how others tag stuff
  • legitimacy of reading by popularity? like popular facebook profile
• more use - less meaning?
• more use - more common or more stuff?

No consistency but some overlap -

• which tags help? which don't? why?
• use not for greater good but for own purposes

Flickr

• same idea: look at tags for intentional choices
• tags collect other content to create an on the fly collection

amazon tags not evident. go to record, scroll down

• but are they useful?
• at bottom of page, find amazon's official language
• the more findable, the more valuable

• using for personal means - but also for others?

Rhetorical connections

• memory - mnemonic: to remind you about stuff
• logos - can be tagged to help others find and understand what the source is about -
• phronesis - practical wisdom: shows how this item is viewed / understood

The argument of the tag is the argument of the agora: the way the populace looks at the world.

But what makes a good popular tag might not make a good findability tag - which defines a shift in purpose between taxonomies and folksonomies.

My additions

invention - tagging an item creates associative connections, but also creates collections. Users can move through the tagged items as thorough a hypertext or wiki text, garnering what they need. We can look at tag clouds as documents, which persuade us to read in particular ways - both by path and by topic.

There is little control over the whole, however. The reader can abandon the tag set at any time. And it just might not be persuasively interesting. The tagging might be so personal, idiosyncratic, as to not be rhetorically active. At that point, we move to semiotics.

Invention and the wisdom of crowds
Explore this: go to my collection and see how to read it - even following into the collections of others.

• follow a tag to Others... and look at Common Tags
• note that tagger can add notes to the item
• follow one of the note takers to that person's collection

and comments

• http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/01/20/social_consequences_of_social_tagging.php

serendipity -

• a tag as a rhetorical statement -

or is tagging aretoriical?

tags are based on a personal search experience - which is how you'll remember it later.