Tagging Variations

Today I was supposed to get stuck right back into planning for Term 1, but alas, I was found to be procrastinating. Not entirely a waste of time though as it saw me doing something I’ve been planning to do for ages – tidying up the tags I use for bookmarking sites in Diigo. The reason I wanted to do this was because I had several tags for the one thing, for example: socialnetworking and social_networking and ‘social networking.’ I know, I could tag each site that I wanted to use this tag on three different ways, but I really am in favour of keeping things as simple as possible and so wanted to use just one version. Which one though? Does it matter?I actually like the social_networking version best because it separates the words making them easier to read but keeps the whole phrase clearly together. But, I didn’t choose to go with that version because after looking around a bit at what other people were doing, most people use the version without spaces – socialnetworking.

On the edit tags page on Diigo it tells me how many times I’ve used a particular tag as well as telling me how many times that tag has been used throughout Diigo. For example, you can see here that I have used the tag google_earth 6 times, but it has been used throughout the Diigo community 1251 times to tag different websites.

If I change that tag to googleearth as one word then let’s see what happens:

Ah! Now I see this variation has been used 4378 times throughout the community.

So, what’s the moral of the story? For me, it’s a few points:

There are a few different tagging variations used
Most people tag by not putting spaces between the words
It doesn’t matter which variation I use, so I’ll stick with one to keep things simple for myself
When searching by using tags it’s important to make sure I try a few variations of the tag to maximse search results.

Here are a few questions I’ve had about tagging for a while:

When we tag things should we think that we tagging for ourselves to find it later, or for others? Of course we are doing both in reality and tagging things so others can find them is the social part of ’social bookmarking’!
How should this effect the tags we use, as in the number of tags per bookmark, or the detail? Does it matter? Advice I’ve read in the past says to use as many tags as possible per bookmark/item. I guess that makes sense as giving something a tag in effect puts it into a ‘folder’ of other items with that tag. People will look in different ‘folders’ for the same thing, so as many tags as a practicable makes sense.
Should we use variations of the same tag on each bookmark?
Does anyone have a system they use when tagging? For example, do you use words from the title, then words from the first paragraph, and then look at the overall article?

Tagging is something I have found confusing in the past and a while to get used to so if you’ve got some great advice, I’d love to hear it!

Networking and Sleeping

I’m behind in blog posts, I haven’t tweeted much lately, I can’t remember the last time I logged into that site! Oh, god, here’s another one. Hey looks cool. I’ll join. Woops, now I have to update it?! But, I’ve already got something similar. But everyone else is on it…Will I miss out? I said I’d start that wiki, but haven’t put anything on it yet. I started that group, but haven’t posted anything! Oh, and blog posts. Need more blog posts…

I’ve been out of the loop for the past three weeks or so and consequently feel fairly disconnected. Ah, this happens every now and again through those stages of insane life busy-ness that we all undoubtedly have at some point. While trying to reconnect myself though I started thinking about what makes someone a valuable member for their social networks (even if they drop off the face of cyberspace for a while!). It’s challenging to keep up with all the things that are going on – joining this that or the other new application/tool only to then discover that, as valuable as it is, it’s another account to keep up to date.

I am a member of quite a few different things, but I know I don’t use them all to my full potential or the network’s full potential. I do contribute, but I’m sure I could do more. Although, that’s a dangerous way to think sometimes, as there is always more that can be done, or something that can be improved.

I can’t possibly contribute to every network that I’m part of everyday or else I would never have time to plan for school, cook a meal (even though I try to avoid doing that anyway) or simply sit and chat with my husband.

What does it mean to be a valuable network member? Some of my ideas follow. Please leave your own in a comment!

regular contribution of quality material (blog posts or useful links)
regular direct contact with key people in your network. You can’t build effective relationships by relying solely on a profile page or a few blog posts
regular reading of and commenting on other members’ contributions

How to be an effective network member and still have time to sleep:

There really is no secret. For me, it’s about focus. It’s the same when facing a reader full of feeds and feeling overwhelmed. It’s about deciding what I want to get out of a particular network for a given session and focusing on that. I think of it this way:

Problem: Haven’t written on my blogs for a while. Need to write better quality posts

Solution: Decide that for this afternoon or whenever that my aim is to write however many blog posts. Do that. Don’t have Twitter on. Email is No Go Zone.

Problem: Haven’t had an good conversations on Twitter lately. Feeling out of the loop. Watching too many good conversations with interesting people who aren’t following me!

Solution: Ignore my blogs. Don’t visit anyone elses. Don’t worry about commenting for a while. Just focus on putting up some good thoughts in Twitter, posting some good links and maybe follow a couple of new people.

Problem: Delicious links a mess and don’t even know how to use Diigo yet.

Solution: Ignore blogging. Forget my podcast. Maybe leave Twitter on though cause undoubtedly there will be someone there who can help me out.

Problem: Have not even logged into many ning networks!

Solution: Question whether I really need to be part of them all? If I don’t have time to contribute, should I even be there? Probably not. Then, get cup of tea. Take laptop into bedroom. Climb back into bed. Stay there until important ones have been chosen and contributed to. Maybe add something to them once a week or fortnight. Can only do what I can do.
I think the key thing for me to remember is that in this age of mass amounts of (digital and very easy to access) information I cannot possibly know, be part of or absorb everything. I don’t really want to be a ‘jack of all trades and a master of none.’ I want my main blog, technoLOTE (language teaching and technology) to grow, so that will be my main focus.

Oh to be a Master…