Flickr

&

del.icio.us

Jessamyn West
www.librarian.net/talks/delflk

24sep07

Simple Social Software

• easy upload - from your phone, iphoto/picasa, winxp, email
• easy find - search, tags, browse, popular, favorites
• easy share - simple licensing, contacts/family/friends, comments & notes

But what's the big deal?

[photo by Cimm]

Metadata...

• ...by me!
• ...by my family and friends!
• ...by anyone?

links: my popular tags, popular tags
library tag: mine, all, clusters
orange tag: mine, all, clusters

Want more? Try: Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia by Cory Doctorow [old, still good]. [photo by audreyjm529]

    vs.    

It's not a fight. The systems can co-exist. But we need to recognize the differences between paper and digital data.

FOLKSONOMY

• user created metadata
• "grassroots community classification of digital assets"
• flat namespace
• not mutally exclusive with other systems

• helps with scalability problems with professionally created metadata [time & effort]
• helps involve users in the process & tames the sharing urge

Want more? Metadata for the Masses by Peter Merholz, or Grassroots Cooperative Categorization Of Digital Content Assets: Folksonomies, What They Are, Why They Work by Robin Good, or Folksonomies - Tidying up Tags?

"Tagging gets better with scale."

• 130,000 bookmarks added per day (cite)
• 2,000,000+ users now, 30,000 in the beginning of 2005. (cite1, cite2)

links: my tags, popular tags
library tag: mine, all
orange tag: mine, all


Want more? Library Journal says "Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us"

Want more? An updated list of libraries using del.icio.us. Example: Natural Resources of Canada library del.icio.us explanation, NRCan's links

Jessamyn West is the editor of the weblog librarian.net and the co-editor of Revolting Librarians Redux. She works as a community technology librarian with people and libraries in Central Vermont. Look at her Flickr pictures here and her del.icio.us tags here.

This presentation was created in HTML using CSS. There was no PowerPoint involved in this presentation except as a nagging bad example. The layout and stylesheet are available to borrow via a share and share alike creative commons license. See source code for details.

slides version | printable version