Well, I've been gone from the blog for so long it's hard to get back into the swing of things. I intended primarily to work on my Library Learning 2.0 lessons at work but the past few months have been so busy at the library I had to keep putting 2.0 on the back burner. However, I have been doing some of the lessons that involve reading, exploring, and watching tutorials....I just haven't been blogging about it. That was a mistake, as I have forgotten some of the brilliant observations that occurred to me at the time ("yeah, right!" you say). In retrospect, I wish I had skipped over the "tagging" section temporarily and come back to it as some of the others did. It is somewhat complicated, but not overwhelmingly so as I had feared. It just involves a new way of thinking about things.
A lot of my problems would be solved if I just spent more time exploring the Internet and keeping up with the new technologies - without having to become immersed in them. Several years ago, my links aka "Favorites" area on AOL sort of broke down. Actually, the software has gotten corrupted several times which caused problems, but mainly what I am referring to here is that I stopped putting my links into the proper categories and it didn't take long to get hopelessly buried in unclassified links. Now I see that there is a whole new way of making connections and I must relearn how I think about keeping track of things I like. I no longer need to rely on AOL to maintain my Favorites lists.
I have already used tags to a limited extent but now I have learned a great deal via http://del.icio.us/ and http://technorati.com/ - these are wonderful resources to use and you could easily spend hours on those sites (days, weeks, months, years?). I think I have a pretty good basic understanding of tags now, although to truly learn I need to practice using them and keep doing it regularly. I need to make reading blogs and blogging part of my regular routine, though I certainly don't want to blog just for the sake of blogging - I want my remarks to be interesting to somebody besides me! Hopefully, once I get past the lesson stage of my blog, I can start commenting on lots of different interesting subjects. I do have several decent blogs on my Myspace page, though I have neglected that one as well. I like what they are doing on Technorati - the video tour was useful. The use of pictures and video with tagging is cool. I look forward to starting accounts with both of these resources soon. One thing I need to work on is using and transferring HTML code - so far I'm pretty sloppy at that and I have an imperfect understanding of how that works. del.icio.us is amazingly versatile and I find the drawbacks interesting but not insurmountable. I have noticed on Wikipedia that frequently the wrong tag is given to a term and I imagine that this happens on other tagging sites as well, but all it needs is for someone to correct it.
I have been reading other people's blogs on this subject (tagging) and there is nothing new or different I can think of to comment on at the moment - but I will come back to it later.
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Tagging is one of those things that, once you "get" it, it becomes something that seems natural and obvious. Of course, it isn't - but once you get into the groove, it'll be second nature to want to tag EVERYTHING. One thing I've seen at conferences is people using empty space on ID badges to "tag" themselves and others. Each person starts off with one or two descriptive phrases about themselves, then others, as they get to know them, add more. This is a great conversations starter and an easy way to get into discussions about your passions - you know who else is "into" the same things you are because they've tagged themselves.
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