PUBLIC MARKS from svartling with tags folksonomy & tagging

“Jerome’s Keywords” is a plugin for WordPress 1.5 to associate keywords with your posts.

Welcome to Supr.c.ilio.us, the World's First Social Social Tagging Site Tagging Site™. This is the place to come to tag all those other tagging sites. Why would you want to do that? Good thing you asked, because we were going to tell you anyway...

Users on del.icio.us who give meaningful tags to helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently doing the same) will be rewarded with higher CollaborativeRank, which means that their tagging will have greater influence on this search engine's rankings.

Many people think tagging provides an elegant paradigm of organizing information. In addition, we're starting to see the "power of many" being leveraged to build fancy stuff like shared folksonomies where you plug your personal information sphere into the collective mindset. Having sat through half a dozen usability tests for MyJeeves, however, it is pretty clear to me that foldering is a more intuitive way of organizing, especially to those new to the exciting world of personal information management. Foldering may be clunky, but it's how people think - at least that's how they think today. Maybe it's because we are naturally wired that way, or maybe it's because most of us grew up with Windows. What is certain is that after a while, most users end up with an unmanageable folder hierarchy and start losing track of where things are. What can be done to take users out of this frustrating mess? Or more exactly, assuming that tagging is indeed one solution, how can we help users to transition from folders to tags, or at least add tagging to their repetoire? When we were scoping MyJeeves 1.2 a while back, this was the topic of endless coffee talks…and one or two beer talks.

Tagifieds is a free, open-ended, tag-based bulletin board. It liberates you from the burden of categories and lets you decide how to keep stuff organized. Online classifieds, notes, recipes, reviews, rants, and scrapbooks are but a few good uses for it. It's up to you.

Simpy is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users' links and tags. You can be open and share your links with others, or keep them private. Simpy also helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interesting sites, publish your bookmarks, detect and eliminate link-rot, etc.

Backflip is a free service currently being run by volunteers. A few years ago, Backflip was a startup with funding and a bright future. Economic woes at the start of the 21st century forced the parent company to make a decision. Either close the site down, or sell the Backflip assets to a few dedicated ex-Backflip employees to continue running the site. In their wisdom the board and founders decided on the latter.

This article looks at the evolving crop of social bookmarking tools, their functionality and examples of use. The goal is to help nonprofits understand the value of using social bookmarking tools and to determine which social bookmarking tool would be serve their needs. This is directed at nonprofit uses of these tools.