Especially for those who, like me, missed David W’s keynote today at the London Online conference, here are some notes I made during his excellent talk at Nature yesterday. It was on the subject of his work in progress, Everything is Miscellaneous, which is about information organisation in the age of the web and focuses quite heavily on tagging.

At absolutely no extra charge, there are also notes from a talk by our other distinguished guest yesterday: Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.

Tim Appnel’s written some great plugins for Movable Type and now he’s got a slick tag plugin called Tags.App that converts MT’s hierarchical categories into tags:

The basis of Tags.App was originally developed for The O’Reilly Radar weblog … back in March. It essentially brought tagging to MT. It provides the means to dynamically navigate tags and see tag intersections, in addition to display tag data as lists and clouds. In the last release I added the ability to view tags across multiple weblogs and create tag clouds from other data sources.

Note that Tags.App is a commercial product. Tim also offers a free scaled-down version of the plugin called mt-tagslite.

Compare with the Tags plugin provided as part of the “official” Power Tools collection, which uses the keywords field.

Another tag option for MT is Tagwire, which differentiates itself from Tags.app and Tagslite by its support of multilingual tagging and the use of the keywords field, leaving categories separate. According to its creator, it can “[lead] to performance degradation especially for rebuilding, but Tagwire employs PluginData and Request Cache effectively and achieves enough speed.” Also: “Though Tagwire generates no static tag archives, it couples with Tim Appnel’s MT-XSearch and supports Dynamic Tag Archiving.”

Tagging inside the corporate firewall seems to me to be one of the great emerging hopes for this model of information management. Not only would it be cool if companies could use tags to help sort out their internal (and infernal) information haystacks, it might even be a money-spinner for software vendors. At Web 2.0, Josh Schachter of del.icio.us mentioned that he regularly gets requests from companies for ‘Intranet Delicious’, though he didn’t sound particularly interested in developing it as a business line. IBM appears to see things differently: David W reports that they have created ‘dogear’, a prototype corporate tagging system.

At Nature, we’ve had similar experiences to Josh’s with our own application, Connotea. Since our readers and other customers are largely academics, and since we’ve made Connotea Code available under the GPL, the main trend has been for academic institutions to download it and experiment with their own internal instances (though there’s been plenty of interest from pharma and biotech companies too). Most of this attention has been focused on the use of tagging to organise research information at these institutions, but this overlooks another key activity at many of them: education.

That’s is one reason why I was so interested in this email to the Connotea discussion list by Tony Hirst from the Open University in the UK, which has long been at the forefront of using technology in education, particularly in distance learning. Tony has been thinking about how to use social bookmarking and tagging as ways for students and teachers to share information during a course. He has in mind a controlled model in which there would be at least some level of moderation. In some ways this runs counter to the free and open nature of social bookmarking, at least on sites like del.icio.us. Tony is clearly conscious of this and gives the following reasons for taking a more conservative route, at least initially:

• social bookmarking could become a value-adding service, the reliable provision of which forms part of the institution’s contract with the student; as such, liveness and reliability need to be guaranteed; uniformity of provision (and a guaranteed high quality of provision) to students
• if social bookmarking is to be introduced as part of the learning strategy, some would argue that its use needs to be carefully managed to ensure that it is capable of delivering whatever the learning designer requires; (unfortunately, this approach reminds somewhat of unintended learning as a bad thing);
• integration with other cohort related batch processes (e.g. registering all new students, or setting particular group privileges for a particular cohort);
• Educational establishments need to be wary of what gets published on their domains. List of links to adult resources, for example, are unlikely to be tolerated.

He goes on to give an example of how social bookmarking could be used in practice during a real course.

He then signs off his email with:

This is all very ‘possible’ and ‘potential’ at the moment, but if my institution goes for this, they may go for it in a big way….

Have I been asleep at the wheel? I was browsing Amazon this morning looking for a replacement filter for my Philips coffeemaker (and not having much luck) and I noticed an entry box at the top of a listing enabling site visitors to add tags.

When did Amazon add this feature? Is anyone using it?

Update: Per a reader request I’m posting screenshot here and using it as an excuse for shameless self-promotion:

At DUX*, tagsonomy contributor Gene Smith describes a technique for enabling site participants to define tag synonyms, based on tagging the tags themselves. (via iashlash)

Hah, Gene, beat you to it!

*I’m missing the conference, but enjoying it vicariously via the web.