The third day of Web 2.0 is ending and a few of sessions are missing. I'm following the Designing Tag Navigation session. It is a session I was very interested in so I want to share with you what I've learned :
Tagging != Tag Cloud
Tag cloud is the representation of metadata. Metadata are independent from the representation.
Tag cloud is good for community or to show the preferences of your members.
Why do people tag ?
To re-find something on web that has potential value and they want to refound it. And to share a resource or object with others.
Three key stages of tagging :
Advices in creating tags:
Encourage tagging. People are lazy. Your job is to make them tagging in
the easiest way. The speaker showed us Flickr and Magnolia as good
example of tagging and Technorati as bad example. Create prompt suggestions to the user for tags (delicious has a great strategy). Avoid space separeted tags and use somma separated. Provide different context to metadata.
Allow people to search their resources (example shown Furl), filtering and sorting.
Combining tag is a very cool mechanism to allow people to combine more tags together (delicious does that del.icio.us/marcocasario/flex+ajax) and providing the context.
Expose other types of relevant metadata mixing metadata (example shown LibraryThing).
Expose tags at the resource level
Accessibility and Tagging : there are some issues with tags and screen readers. Give the possibility to skip your tag resources for accessibility purposes.
Conclusion : Tagging offers an alternative to top down classification
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