In Online Information Folksonomy Presentation Posted :: Personal InfoCloud Thomas Vander Wal writes about tagging, folksonomy and taxonomy and rightly points out that they are not necessarily opposed or incompatible concepts. I'd go further than him though to suggest that they are, in fact, quite compatible.
In Lowering Barriers to Participation, Bradley Horowitz points out how tagging lowers the barriers to participation and thus allows ordinary users to create useful metadata. I think he's right on here. Especially on a system such as del.icio.us, the ease of use and triviality of creating tags allows pretty much anyone to create "personally useful" metadata. As an aide memoire, that is exactly what it should allow.
Is it authoritative? Is it useful for others? That's for someone else to decide. It's easy and useful for me, and if there are natural concordances with others, I can take advantage of those. That should be enough, and is.
My favourite little cafe is a place called "The Beanery" on the UBC campus in the middle of the Fairview residences. Sonny and Sonya, who run the place, are two wonderful friendly hosts, the atmosphere is great, and UBC wireless is usually available. It's my second office.
It's located inside the Fairview residences. The entrance to the residences is at the intersection of Fairview Ave. and Western Parkway. There's a sign there for the Beanery, but it is actually all the way in the back of the residence complex, near Pearkes Lane.
I've been asked repeatedly by students and others for advice on writing a proposal document. As with all documents, I believe that the best way to go about this is to concentrate on two things: the audience and the goal of the document. In general, a proposal is written to someone who has the ability to allow you to do something (i.e. money, resources, supervision) and your goal is to convince them to enable or allow you to do it. With that in mind, we can come up with a few guidelines.
Lee Iverson :: Blog is my new blog on http://elgg.net, an ePortfolio system. I'm using it for my CSCW course EECE 519. I chose it because of the combination of blogging, tagging, selective sharing, and community definition and maintenance. I also have a student studying information sharing behaviours in a community of Elgg users. Let you know how I like it.
Identity
People I Trust
