Tag procrastination

Minutes spent procrastinating with Tag Galaxy: 40 (bad); Galaxies revolving around S. Yoshikawa: 1 (good)

A RL friend directed me to Tag Galaxy at http://www.taggalaxy.com/
Initial impression: Cool. You type in words and phrases, and it matches them with Flickr tags. At first thought that you couldn't do phrases, since it mirrors back the phrase with spaces taken out, but here is the galaxy formed of Sheila Yoshikawa tagged items in Flickr (847 of them, all by me presumably). You can spin the globe (wheeeeeee), or click on a photo to bring it up in size.

With some v. popular terms you get some related tags pictured as satellites. It isn't at all clear how this works (e.g. all my pics on Flickr have more than one tag, so the Sheila Yoshikawa ones all have SL and Second Life as well, & lots have Infolit iSchool, but Sheila Yoshikawa doesn't have any satellites pictured). So perhaps not quite as cool as first thought. Also SL satellites include Second and Life which implies rather simplistic approach to tag association.
Googling the designer's name revealed that everyone ELSE had been saying how cool this was in MAY, and my interest ran out long before managed to find more info on how this coursework/ dissertation project actually worked. However if you need yet another thing to waste your time today, going to http://www.taggalaxy.com/ and typing in a random word may be the answer.

Tags

No of different tags used in this blog: 450 (approx) (like, wow)

Have just added list of Tags/Labels used in this blog to the Adventures home page. Can be found on the right after the j-pop player. There are an awful lot of them. Therefore thought should explain something about my approach to tagging.

Now, whilst at the Uni of Strathclyde, taught indexing for several years. This was for usual reason i.e. no-one else wanted to teaching indexing and I agreed to do it when arrived as new lecturer and knew no better.

Thus am aware of benefits of controlled vocabularies, can tell a Broader from a Narrower term, and describe the glory that is the Scope Note. Since started in this business when indexes were mostly on paper also know the difference between KWIC and KWOC and might even still attempt a description of PRECIS.

However, fond readers will note that in this blog have happily thrown all that nonsense out of the window. Instead am practising the art of Tagging as Stream of Consciousness. Basically, when come to the end of the entry, fill in the tags happily with whatever first comes into head. This is usually related to the content of the entry, though this is not guaranteed. Sometimes yield happily to word association e.g. in post before last tagged Mirror (because was using mirror water effect) and then tagged Smoke, since, you know, there is that phrase smoke and mirrors. Think this may be rather ineffective subconcious act of subversion against the dark tides of orderly metadata.

Therefore you may find the list of tags:

a) A delightful source of serendipitous amusement; or

b) A disgrace.

Enjoy! (As the waitress says when serving you with a plate of slightly overcooked pasta and a glass of slightly underchilled white wine)

Tag clouds

Tag clouds created: 2 (good)

Happened across reference to various tag cloud generators and with usual butterfly inclinations hastened to same, and created some tag clouds by typing in web address of this blog. First one created using Wordle was cool, insofar as a) could play around with different fonts and b) is in colour. Here it is:



As "SL" is in blue is not most obvious word, but is in fact largest. Can see that was talking a lot about the conference in these posts.

Second tag cloud seemed duller, but perhaps will look better when is actually posted.

access attended australia bad blog chatlogs com comments conference cool discussion due education entries etc facebook hello hours however http information interest labels land learning library life literacy ltea2008 night north people pic posted projects rl sad second session sheila since sl spent students university virtual wandered work world yoshikawa

created at TagCrowd.com