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This is an old revision of WikkaFolksonomy made by DarTar on 2005-04-11 08:42:42.

 

Wikka Tags


More on tagging: Wikipedia:Folksonomy
 


What is tagging

I'd like to share with you some thoughts on the possibility of integrating a tagging system into WikkaWiki.

Tags are a simple way of labelling URLs and building a basic category system.

Tagging (aka Folksonomy or Social bookmarking) is becoming one of the most pervasive practices in the field of SocialSoftware social software. Tags allow users to categorize content: categories emerge from single users' labelling of URLs. Tags offer also a smart (distributed) ranking system: URLs that receive more times the same tag are likely to emerge as the most relevant and authoritative sources for the topic associated to the tag (an idea similar to the PR strategy adopted by Google). Web services building categories out of users' tags include del.icio.us (the first service which introduced tagging), Technorati, Simpy, Jots.

An example of tagging


Look at this example of technorati's page for the tag: wiki or just choose one of these tags.

Why tagging


The interest of tags is twofold.

  1. On the one hand, tags can be used internally as an alternative to categories: they help organize content by topic in a simple and intuitive way.
  1. On the other hand, tags can be used to post labelled content to external sites.

The second aspect deserves some attention. It is quite common for bloggers to tag their posts, so that web services like technorati can categorize them by topic. It might be interesting to add such a feature to wikis as well.

How to publish tags

Publishing tags requires just a simple modification of the RSS generation script, to add the following lines:

  <category>[tagname]</category>
  <dc:subject>[tagname]</dc:subject>


Another way to tag pages consists in adding a rel="tag" attribute to a link. For instance:

 <a href="http://apple.com/ipod" rel="tag">iPod</a>
 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity" rel="tag">Gravity</a>
 <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua" rel="tag">Chihuahua</a>


Once links or RSS contain tag information, you can easily publish them by pinging (automatically or manually) web services like technorati. The tagged URL will then show up in the corresponding tag page.


Integrating tags in a wiki


Forthcoming...




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