Most SharingLinks users tell me they really like the thumbnail preview that appears when you hover over a bookmark. But a few have told me it drives them CRAZY! Not wanting to harm anyone’s mental health, we have now made this feature optional. So those of you who don’t like it, can simply edit your profile, and turn these previews off.

Another change I have wanted for awhile was opening the bookmarks in a new window. When I am using SharingLinks to research new topics, I invariably want to go back to the site for more goodies. So we have changed the default behavior to open bookmarks in a new window. But we also made this configurable,so each of you can choose your own default: new window or same window.

Both of the options are found by going to your My Bookmarks page, then looking in the right-hand column for “Edit My Profile.” If you make no changes, the default will be to display thumbnail previews and to open bookmarks in a new window.

Like these new features? Let me know.

Are you one of those people who enjoy posting things on the internet? Do you enjoy creating blogs, podcasts or videocasts? Do you like to post pictures online in community groups so that you can share your experiences with other people? If you have answered yes to these questions then you probably already have a good awareness of what tags are, but that doesn’t mean you actually understand what tags are. There are many people out there who think that they understand what tags are, but when it comes to using them they figure out that they actually have no clue about what tags are and what they are going to be used for. The good news is that this article is designed to explain to you what tags are in a simple manner, and not to mention this article is going to explain to you how tags are used on the internet.

Let’s begin by first talking about what tags are; we will talk about how tags are used after you have a basic understanding of what tags are. The reason for this is that sometimes having the basic knowledge isn’t enough and by seeing how something is used you can get an even better understanding of what that item is. The same thing holds true for tags, you will have the basic knowledge of what they are and then by seeing how they are used, looking at some examples, then you can solidify your knowledge and understand exactly what tags are.

Tags are very similar to keywords. Basically tags are words or phrases that you are going to be using to describe something. Tags are also used to help organize a lot of information. But something that you need to know about tags is that they offer you a way to categorize your content, but with tags this process is actually a lot more fluid and flexible. The reason that the method of using tags is more fluid and flexible is because you are not limited to only using certain categories; basically you are using a variety of words and/or phrases to describe your content. Basically what this means is that you can have as many tags as you want to help you describe your information, and it has been proven that the more tags you use the more chances are your information will be found.

But something else that you want to keep in mind about tags is that even though there is no limit on how many tags you can use to describe your content there are some things that you need to keep in mind when it comes to creating tags. First of all when you are creating tags to describe your information you are going to want to choose tags that are relevant to what you are describing. Basically you are not going to want to choose words that do not describe your information. For example if your article is about cats you are not going to want to create a tag called cows. The second thing that you want to keep in mind is that sure the more tags you create the more chances your information will be found, but there is such thing as going overboard. Basically you are not going to want to use every word that you can think of to describe your article because then your information will pop up in places where it is not really needed.

So in case you haven’t figured it out tags are used to describe videocasts, podcasts, blogs, articles or numerous other things that you post on the internet. Basically with tags what you do is think of words that you can use to describe what you are posting and include those words with your post. Then the tags are used to search for your information. Basically what happens is people will enter in certain key words and if those key words match your tags then your information will come up for them to look at.

If you have ever used the internet for any kind of research than you are aware of search engines and how helpful they can be. But what you might not be aware of is how search engines work. Sure most of you think it is a simple concept you type in what you are looking for and you get results based on what you have typed in. This is the basics of search engines, but what you don’t know is how the search engine knows how to include certain pages and in what order to put the pages. If you have often wondered how the search engine system actually works then this is the perfect article for you to read. The reason that this is a great article for you to read is because this article is going to discuss folksonomies, which is one of the first things that you need to learn about so you can understand how a basic search engine works.

Let’s first begin by discussing what folksonomy is because basically folksonomies is the plural form of folksonomy. Folksonomy is the method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Basically folksonomy is using words that will help computer search engines to recognize your website and display it on a search engine results page in the proper category. Basically this is done through the use of tags or what other people refer to as key words. In fact folksonomy is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social tagging and numerous other names.

Something else that you should know about folksonomies is that they actually became popular on the internet around 2004 with social software applications such as social bookmarking or annotating photographs. The websites that support tagging and the folksonomy principle are referred to in the context of Web 2.0 because participation is extremely easy, not to mention the fact that tagging data is used in numerous ways to help find the information that you are looking for. One way that tagging data is used to help you find the information you are looking for is through tag clouds. Basically tag clouds are used a lot to actually visualize the most used tags of a folksonomy. Which something else you need to know is that the term folksonomy is also used to denote only the set of tags that are created in social tagging.

Another thing that you need to know about folksonomies is that even though they can be used in other contexts they are pretty much internet based. Basically what folksonomic tagging is intended to make information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. Something else that not many people are aware of is that a well developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both created by and familiar to its primary users. But as the folksonomies develop in internet-mediated social environments people can usually discover who created a folksonomy tag, not to mention see the other tags that this person created. What this basically means is that folksonomy users often discover the tag sets of another user who usually interprets the tag content in a way that makes sense to them. What this does is provides the user with a rewarding gain to find related content, which is also known as pivot browsing.

But something that you need to know is that even though folksonomies are internet based they are not a part of the World Wide Web protocols. What this means is that not every website on the internet uses folksonomies, in fact you will mostly find folksonomies in web based communities where there are provisions made at the site level for creating and using tags, basically the purpose of the folksonomies is to allow the users of the community to share user-generated content or to collaboratively label existing content.

As most of you are aware of there is a classification process that is used on the internet to organize information. Basically this classification process is used to help users find information that they are looking for as fast as possible. When it comes to this classification process there are numerous things that go into making up the entire process. The first thing that you need to know about is tags, which are basically the words that are used to describe the information you are posting on the internet. The next two things that you need to know about are folksonomy and top-down taxonomy, the reason why you need to know about both of these is that the two kind of work together to help you find information on the internet. Basically both top-down taxonomy and folksonomy are methods that are used to help categorize the information you find on the internet.

Let’s begin by first talking about taxonomy in general. Most of you have probably heard of the word taxonomy at some point in your life because it is a word that is used in numerous science classes. The reason for this is that taxonomy is a science, but unlike the study of living objects or chemicals taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming objects. Basically what happens with taxonomy is that the objects are identified and named and then are placed in different categories depending on their classification. So basically what this means is that taxonomy is used to place things into a certain order, basically to organize things.

Now that we understand about taxonomy we need to take a look at top-down taxonomy. Basically top-down taxonomy is an approach to taxonomy. With this approach you basically have one set of tags and one sort order that is used to help identify the information that you are looking for. One of the best examples of the top-down taxonomy approach is Yahoo!, which was one of the earliest general directories for content on the internet. Basically top-down taxonomy is a controlled vocabulary, which actually means that there are limitations on the tags that are used to describe the content that is being posted.

Now we need to take a look at folksonomy to be sure that we understand that method. Folksonomy is the method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Basically folksonomy is using words that will help computer search engines to recognize your website and display it on a search engine results page in the proper category. Basically this is done through the use of tags or what other people refer to as key words. In fact folksonomy is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social tagging and numerous other names.

So as you can tell both folksonomy and top-down taxonomy have their uses on the internet. But the thing is that depending on who you talk to and what information you find on the internet you are going to get different opinions. Many people believe that folksonomy is actually better because it is not as restrictive. But regardless of what people think of as the better system and no matter how many differences they quote the truth of the matter is that there are some differences, but there are more similarities between the two systems than there are differences. In fact many people tend to think that the best possible solution would be to make some new kind of method that combined these two methods together. One of these would be taxonomy-directed-folksonomy which would rely on the user interface to suggest tags from a formal taxonomy, but allows many users to use their own tags.

I thought this morning I’d point out a few new tagging features over at SharingLinks.com.

First, for those not familiar with the project, here’s a quickie overview. SharingLinks.com is a social bookmarking project for educators and parents and anyone interested in educational use of the Internet. The purpose is to “share” our bookmarks and great site finds by posting them at the site. In a nutshell, the entire experiment is dependent on “tags” which are keyword phrases that each user adds to their shared bookmarks.

Okay .. now here’s a sneak peek at one of new tag enhancements at SharingLinks: in addition to the boolean “AND” operator, we now also have a boolean “OR.” Or, if you prefer, we have union as well as intersection. Here are some examples.

First we have all bookmarks tagged “keyboarding”
http://www.sharinglinks.com/tags/keyboarding

Then we look in the Related Tags box in the upper-right of the page, and we see tags such as typing, keyboard, games, alphabet, and so on. Clicking on any the tags, will bring up a list of the the bookmarks so tagged. But notice the + and |. These are our boolean operators “and” and “or” respectively.

Noticing that some users use the tag “typing” INSTEAD of “keyboarding” .. we get a more comprehensive listing of bookmarks by looking at those that are tagged EITHER “keyboarding” or “typing”. We get here by clicking on the | symbol next to the tag “typing”.
http://www.sharinglinks.com/tags/keyboarding|typing