Aquabrowser updates

I just discovered that Aquabrowser, one of our catalogs, has been adding web 2.0 functionality. They already had the ability to add RSS feeds in the catalog although BCPL has not turned that feature on yet.

1) Now  the company has added something they call “My Discoveries” which offers:

• Lists that users can make for themselves or make public to help others
• Tagging, Reviewing and Scoring on any item
• Personal profiles

AquaBrowser connects people and knowledge by offering user tagging and user reviews on any item in your collection. This kind of social searching perfectly combines human intelligence with search algorithms to perform information retrieval. User tags and reviews from the local library users will only add to the ability of community libraries to be tailored for the people they are intended, because those very people will be giving their input to almost every dynamic of the library catalog.

2) AquaBrowser now allows all the item records in a library’s collection to be indexed and found by any internet search engine, as if to create a separate web page for every title in the library’s collection. This means any item in the entire collection can be found as a search result when performing a regular web search, driving traffic to the library website and allowing anyone to discover its community valuable information. The more accessible a library is online, the more the community uses and benefits from it. This information can be found in the Archive section of MediaLab’s website.

Tags, labels, categories

Our library system is doing the 23 Things program and most people are using Blogger for their blog.  Blogger uses “labels” to organize your posts. WordPress uses “categories” but I also have a “tag’ cloud on my site. I wasn’t clear about the differences between tags, labels and categories so I went searching for an answer. It turns out that initially they were very different concepts but they all seem to be essentially the same thing now (… I think).

What’s important for us to know is that it gives you an easy way for your blog readers to group your posts about a particular topic. At the end of the 23 Things program I want to be able to click on the tag/label/category for BCPL2.0 to get all of my posts that had ideas I thought BCPL might be able to use with our customers. Of course this depends on me actually remembering to tag it correctly – that might be a stretch.

1. Categories are like folders on your computer. You can have a category inside of a category. Categories add organization and order whereas tags add descriptions. Eric, from the blog, Internet Duct Tape, describes the differences this way: “Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, and “if lost please return to the dude with the fat cat.” “
2. Tags and Labels are keywords that you can use to “catalog” your posts or pictures. They are handy if you blog about a lot of different subjects, since readers can then choose to view all of your posts on, say, Library2 at once. One post could use the tags Library2, Flickr, mashups. Another post might use Library2, blogs and forums. If you click on the tag “Library2″ you would get all of your posts that have that tag and you would get both of these posts. If you click on the tag “Flickr” you would only get the first post and any others with the same tag. If you have a team blog, you could also give each member their own label, so you could easily read all the posts by any one of them. The nice thing about tags and labels is that they are so flexible. You’re not restricted to someone else’s ideas of how information should be grouped. The down side is if you misspell the tag. You could have Flickr and Flicker.

When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing 

10 Minute Blog Tips: Creating Compelling Categories

Climbing Out of Category Hell

Using Categories & Tags in WordPress and Other Blogs

purl soho string  Originally uploaded by striatic

Week 6, Thing 14: Discover Technorati and learn how tags work with blogs

This afternoon I’ve been playing with Technorati. I use WordPress for my blog so when I tag my posts with whatever categories are relevant, they are picked up in Technorati as tags. I added the category “mdlearn2″ to my post about Thing 13, and it appears in Technorati when I do a search for mdlearn2.

This picture is of the tag results page in Technorati. Very cool to have the posts, blogs, videos, etc. for your search terms all pulled together in one place. Wouldn’t this be helpful for researching a topic?

I tried searching for the keyword “Learning 2.0.” From the search results page you get tabs for Quick View, Posts, Blogs, Videos, Photos, Music and Events. The search results under each tab are different: I get individual posts under the Posts tab. I didn’t get any blogs listed under the Blogs tab (Blog directory) although I guess there would have been if they had existed. the Quick View tab gives me search results for “Learning 2.0″, including a video that Helene Blowers created.

Week 6, Thing 13: Tagging and Del.icio.us

I found this good explanation of the difference between tagging and categories.

Aaron Brazell says in his post “Tag, Your it! Leveraging Tagging for your blog,” that categories are structured and tags are unstructured.

“The main difference between categories and tags is the way they organize content. Categories use the “tree” style concept that is probably the easiest to envision. You may have a series of categories such as “News”, “Music”, “Tech” with subcategories nested under those categories. The News category might have subcategories like “Politics”, “Main Stream Media”, and “Iraq” and the Music category might have subcategories like “Melbourne Bands” or “CD Reviews”.

In this way, content is organized in a structural way. Every entry has a bucket to go in and in this way, content can be easily maintained.

However, tagging provides more of a granular way of organizing content and it follows more of a “brain storage” approach.”

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/27/tag-youre-it-leveraging-tagging-for-your-blog/

The tutorial for De.li.cious is pretty good – it tells me exactly how to use it to my advantage. I’ll try her directions for greenhouse gardening, colonial genealogy and maybe for my trip to Europe this fall. And of course for Library 2.0.