DeGroodt Digital Dash Week 6: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

Tag you’re it!

Well, not really, but you can tag the items you post on sites like Pinterest and Twitter to make it easier for others to search for them. This means that you are adding a special character called a hashtag to your keyword to make it searchable. For Example, typing in #chicken means that the when someone searches for the keyword “chicken”, your post will come up in the list of results. Some databases like Blogger have a tag field box where you would enter in all the words you would like to make searchable. When using a field box, you do not always need the hashtag. Sometimes the words need to either be written as one word no spaces like “chickenrecipe” or listed with commas separating the keywords “chicken recipe, fried chicken”.

When you are in Facebook you tag your friends in your posts by adding the “@” symbol before their name. This means that your post will also appear on your fiends’ timeline and they will receive a notification that you have “tagged” them. Twitter also has this feature when you want to “mention” a person. It will also send a notification.

Social Bookmarking uses this concept of tagging to help you organize your bookmarks. Sites like Delicious are very handy web 2.0 tools that allow you to save websites to lists or boards that you can access at a later date from any computer with Internet access. This comes in very handy when you have hundreds of sites bookmarked and you are looking only for the one that has a certain subject.

You can even tag items in the Brevard County Libraries’ DiscoverCard Catalog . Tagging an item in the card catalog makes it easier for others to search for an item. Examples of tags you might want to use would be series names, volume numbers, or even character names from the book. All tags are moderated before they are posted for others to see.

Here we have expanded the tag box for the book Civil War on Sunday by Mary Pope Osborne. If you were to search for any of those tags, this book would appear in your search results. You can also see at the bottom there is a button to “Add Tag”. This is what you would select if you wanted to submit your own tag to the list. One possible tag for this entry would be “Magic Treehouse” which would make this book appear in the list if the space was forgotten from “Tree House” in the series title.

Have you tried tagging before? What do you think about it?