Digital Arts Service Corps - tagging

Ooh, CTC VISTA word cloud!

Ben Sheldon — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:46:36 +0000

I've been playing around with tag and word clouds lately. Clouds are basically interesting (and esthetically appealing, in my opinion) ways to visualize the prevalence of words. Words that are more prevalent show up larger/darker than more rare ones. Oftentimes you will see Tag Clouds which show how many posts there are in certain categories (we have one on the CTC VISTA Digest).

Below is a word cloud made up of all the posts on CTCVISTA.org. This isn't the categories, but the actual posts themselves. It was created by a very nifty website call TagCrowd.com.

An interesting side note is that, excluding common words (and, like, the, pronouns, etc.), we have a lexicon of 7,369 unique words on the website.

<!--
begin tag cloud : generated by TagCrowd.com
Feel free to modify as long as you keep this notice.

This code and its rendered image are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/

For commercial licensing, contact Daniel Steinbock, daniel@steinbock.org
-->

created at TagCrowd.com

Screencast on Tagging

Ben Sheldon — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 16:50:07 +0000

I just ran across a great screencast on tagging by Beth Kanter for NTEN.

Tagging Explained

Aliya Abbasi — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 18:36:26 +0000

Articles of Explanation

http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html ->"Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense."

http://learn.netsquared.org/getting-started-with-tagging/what-is-tagging -> "is the ability to assign topical keywords to a wide range of digital content, like photos, bookmarks (favourite web sites) and blog posts."

http://blog.leveragedpromotion.com/public/item/117546 -> "is a way to associate an individual blog post with the larger conversation in the blogosphere."

http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page5508.cfm?cg=searchterms&sg=what%20is%20tagging -> "is a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links."

http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html -> "A cognitive analysis of
tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular)...associating an item with a bunch of words, writing down those associations."

Video Presentation

http://news.com.com/1606-2-5798694.html?tag=nl