Internet, like the universe, is expanding in every second. People can be overwhelmed by the huge amount of relevant information that they are looking for. Therefore, online citizens need to pick up some information organising and managing skills in order to gather information more efficiently and effectively. Tagging is one of the great tools that are designed to solve the problems.
del.icio.us is one of the organisations that provide tagging function.
This is my del.icio.us page.
It was a frustrating process to find a single relevant article from the feeds that I have subscribed to in week 2 and tag it. I would say the feeds are not quite relevant to my final project’s topic. I am very surprised, considering online copyright is such a big issue in Hong Kong. However, not even the Hong Kong Intellectual Property Department provides the citizens with news feeds. I am sorry to report that I am not able to find relevant articles in my feeds and tage them.
I then turned to subscribing the feeds of the tags in del.icio.us. It was a much more refreshing experience. I have easily subscribed to del.icio.us/tag/hongkong+copyright, del.icio.us/tag/hongkong+piracy, and del.icio.us/tag/online+copyright. The tags instantly gave me some satisfactory results, including relevant news articles which I think are more authoritative then blog posts. I have also subscribed to the page of jpalfrey, whom was mentioned by Rebecca in the class and tagged a lot of useful and interesting online articles.
Then I began another search on Technorati. I entered the words “hongkong copyright protection”. At first, it brought me a number of articles that were not written in English. So I quickly changed the search requirement to “in English”. There were only 16 relevant blog posts that satisfied the search requirements, and some of them were “assignments”!!!
Google gave me a more satisfactory result. I typed the same words and there were more than 10 pages of results. But of course, many websites are not quite relevant. I think Google did a great job in prioritising the outcomes, as the websites on the first page are more authoritative and trustworthy, such as the Hong Kong Intellectual Property Deparment’s homepage, a consultation paper released by the HKSAR government, the Wikipedia page that I have edited, and a websites of a law firm that explains the copyright protection in Hong Kong.
Undoubtedly, tools like del.icio.us and Technorati give online citizens a new way to do researches and manage the huge amount of information on the internet. However, one should be aware of the results those two provide them with. As I have mentioned before, when I did the search for relevant blog posts on Technorati, it gave me some posts that were assignments, just like the one you are reading now. I do not consider them as authoritative articles or useful for serious research. Also, the quality control of the articles is questionable.
Nevertheless, tagging is a good way to search for relevant news articles published by well-established news organisations. Unlike news feeds, which you have to read the relevant articles before tagging them yourself on the newsreaders, those tools enable you to search the relevant articles that are tagged by other users. As long as somebody has read them and tagged them before, you don’t need to read through all the articles to find the relevant ones. Because the articles are written by professional journalists and published by news organisations, they are much more trustworthy. Moreover, some blog posts that have been tagged could be very informative and interesting, just remember not to cite or use them for serious works. Also, as Lee Rainie wrote in the article “Report on Tagging“, tagging enables us to “retrieve the web content that users already found valuable and of which they want to keep track.” The assigned value of the content gives me some ideas of how important it is.
David Weinberger stated in the article “Tagging and Why It Matters” that tagging changes the direction of defining categories from experts on the top, to users at the bottom. He wrote, “It’ll be messy and inelegant and inefficient, but it will be Good Enough. And, most important, it will be ours, reflecting our needs and our ways of thinking.” Rainie echoed him, saying tagging is “a classic example of bottom-up building of categories instead of top-down imposition of categories.”
I think tagging is a great complement to the news feeds. Now, I don’t have to read all the news stories that appear on my newsreaders and tag them for future use, because I have somebody tag them for me! Although many blog posts also pop up in my newsreader, I can tell easily by the headlines whether they are news articles or blog posts and ignore them if I am looking for serious sources. Although search engines like Google still provide a more convenient way to search information in an ad hoc manner, the news feeds feature of tag engines keep online citizens up-to-date with the specific kind of information they are looking for.
Although tagging might create some problems, such as ambiguity and prone to malicious mis-tagging as suggested by Weinberger, it is like a personal librarian plus secretary that helps you to search relevant articles in the sea of information and remind you of the the updates at the same time, which means it is great.
1 Comment
March 8, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Good job, though I can’t tell from your post whether you have read the Foust chapter.
It’s interesting how different students are having very different experiences and making different conclusions about technorati and del.icio.us depending on their topics.