Note — My new fruity PJs. I took this literally!
Immediate Gratification-Immediate Application. That’s what I got from attending Chris Betcher’s presentation “I Like Delicious Things: An Introduction to Tagging and Folksonomies.”
I have far too many websites bookmarked in my internet explorer “favorites” list, and other than alphabetical order, there is no order. Chris’ explanation of how Delicious uses tags to classify your favorite websites was simple and succinct. Essentially, tagging is the common man’s answer to the Dewey Classification system (being a librarian, this is the one I know best). He explained how tagging created a system of classification based on folksonomy. We’d talked about this before in our 23 Things, but this was a broader explanation, which featured examples from Flickr and Delicious.
The immediate gratification part was a reference he made to a site called Wordle. “Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide.” The c louds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently. It takes all the words from any document you submit, tags them, aggregates the tags, and creates a beautiful word cloud display with creative colors and fonts. I submitted my course description for an independent reading class I teach, and plan to use the art as the cover page to my course description handout. Take a look!. Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed with Creative Commons.
Your session sounds interesting. The title caught my eye, too! I will have to check out Delicious. Love your pjs!
Did you love attending in your particularly attractive pjs? I really liked this activity, and would like to think that I’ll come back and attend a few more. (I haven’t though.)
I liked the idea of learning about what I needed, when I needed it.
You got a nice preview to Flickr…and will really be ready to go when you get to that week.