Category Archives: Labels and Metadata

A key part of managing and using information, data, or content is how we organize it. The key tool for organizing information is metadata (information about information), which typically takes the form of a system of labels. This can be formal (taxonomies, XML tags, etc.) or informal (folksonomies, filing systems, etc.). Labels and metadata are playing an increasingly important role in how we communicate, and even how we think and learn.

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New J-Skills: What to Measure?

Berbercarpet, via Flickr (CC license)
Journalism sudents need the right tools — and skills — for the kinds of careers and opportunities they’re really going to be making for themselves.

Picking up on my post yesterday, Univ. of Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams challenged me (and her other readers) to translate my quick list of what j-schools should be teaching into a something more testable and measurable that could be translated into a curriculum.

Here’s my first shot at that:

  • Content management systems (including blogging tools): First, I’d have the students run a group blog on a topic of their choosing for a year to get comfortable with the content and commenting apects of blogging. (A group blog is likely to get more activity and discussion than individual blogs.) This blog should be based on an expandable, customizable tool like WordPress. Then the students should be taught the basics of information architecture, and from that figure out how to expand or customize their blogs to deliver or integrate new kinds of content or services. This could be as simple as finding and installing WordPress plugins to add features, or integrating content from other places (such as Flickr or del.icio.us). The goal would be to get them to not just understand, but demonstrate that on their own they can envision, research, evaluate, and act upon options to do more with their content online. There’s a lot you can do without getting too geeky. They need to gain the confidence that many options are within their personal grasp — they don’t always need to get permission or beg someone else to do things for them.

There’s a lot more on my list, of course…

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Amy's Adventures, Labels and Metadata, Media Musings, Voices: Blogs, etc. 18 Comments

Copyright Notice: Is the Year Really Necessary?

Here’s something I don’t get, and I’d love it if someone well versed in US copyright law could explain it to me: Why must a copyright notice include a year? Especially if no notice is required for copyright protection?

Having to assign a year to a copyright notice makes things rather confusing in online media. For instance, In a blog or any other site where fresh content regularly appears, there typically is a date assigned to each item (at least in the metadata, if not displayed). But then… there generally is a visible copyright notice that appears throughout the site and is managed by a template. So if you look up archived content from previous years, you’ll view the older content on a page that bears the copyright notice for the current year.

That doesn’t make much sense to me…

My colleague Steve Outing recently reminded his readers to update the year in their online copyright notice. This made me wonder whether a year is really a legal requirement. So I looked it up. Here’s what the US Copyright Office says:
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Labels and Metadata, Media Musings 1 Comment

Apollo Alliance: Good Example of a Search Release

Earlier I discussed an innovative public/media relations technique known as a search release. I just happened to stumble across a good example of an organization that implemented this in a smart way.

I like this strategy because it benefits journalists as well as organizations doing outreach, by making information easier to find. In my book, this blows away traditional direct distribution of press releases to journalists.

Here’s the example…

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Labels and Metadata, Net Effects on Society, Resources Leave a comment

Tagging Isn\’t Just a Popularity Contest

On Jan. 24, Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr said of tagging:

“Tagging is moving against the tide of the net. …In a game of tag, no one wants to be the one doing the tagging. Tagging requires a little extra unnecessary effort that most folks are not only unwilling to make, but aren’t prepared to learn.”

I think he’s right… And I think he’s wrong, too…

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Labels and Metadata, Net Effects on Society, Resources Leave a comment

Why Tagging is Valuable, Despite Its Many Flaws

Tagging (the process of informally categorizing chunks of online content with user-defined labels, aided by various online tools or services) is surprisingly controversial.

Some people adore it and tag everything they find; others disdain its lack of formality or reliability; and most people either experiment with it sporadically or ignore it entirely.

This morning I stumbled across a thoughtful exploration of tagging from someone who is not enamored with the process or results. Check out “Folksonomy Recapitulates Ontology.” Despite its leaden title, this article offers a fairly plain-language and fair examination of the pros and cons of tagging.

Here’s my response to that article…

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Content Style & Business, Conversations, Labels and Metadata, Net Effects on Society, Voices: Blogs, etc. 1 Comment

Survey Question 4: Disclosure of Being Gay

(NOTE: This is part of a series of postings in which I published the results of my informal survey on people’s comfort zones regarding the overlap of professional and personal information online. More about this survey. Overview of numerical responses.)

Now we’re starting to delve into the truly sensitive and intriguing part of the survey – mentioning personal information that might be construed as non-mainstream, taboo, controversial, or “tangentially sexual.”

SURVEY QUESTION 4: In one weblog you read mainly for business reasons, the author mentions in a posting that he is gay. Your reaction:

The big news here is that mentioning on your professional blog that you’re gay is somewhat risky – but probably not as risky as you might imagine. Still, such a non-mainstream and potentially controversial disclosure should be made in a relevent, gentle context, and considered carefully. Know your target audience.

CAVEATS: All of this depends, of course, on whether survey respondents are being honest – and if you consider informal, self-selected surveys of any use at all.

Here are the responses for this question, and my initial observations about them…

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Amy's Adventures, Content Style & Business, Labels and Metadata, Media Musings, Net Effects on Society, Resources 6 Comments

Use Tagging for a Networked Index? Hmmmm….

(NOTE: I published a shorter version of this article last Friday to Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits group weblog. However, I suspect CONTENTIOUS readers might be interested too, so here’s the expanded version.)

There’s a lot of buzz in online circles these days about tagging and social bookmarking. Are these networking tools relevant to news organizations? I think so, precisely because they’re messy and informal…

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Arranging Ideas, Labels and Metadata, Resources 17 Comments

Furl and Del.icio.us: Almost Perfect Together

As I’ve mentioned before, two web-based tools I use extensively to keep track of important or interesting online information are Furl and del.icio.us. Both of these tools help me file links that I wish to remember or recommend, and allow me to share that information flexibly.

Over the last few months I’ve developed my own way of using these two tools together. It suits me, and I think it suits the unique strengths of each tool. So in case it’s useful to others, here’s how I use Furl and del.icio.us together…

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Labels and Metadata 2 Comments

Strengths and Weaknesses of Metadata Schemes

I was just reading an item in Dave Taylor’s blog The Intuitive Life called Technorati tags: Good idea, terrible implementation. There, Dave voiced this complaint:

“What if when I wrote weblog entries about General Motors, I included a special tag, a keyword tag, that let everyone who wanted to read blog entries about General Motors read my weblog article, without otherwise having to subscribe to my blog? Makes sense. Now, should it be gm or GM or generalmotors or general motors or General Motors or GM Corporation or … ?

“Therein lies the fundamental problem with Technorati Tags, as promoted by the popular weblog search system and utilized by a small percentage of bloggers.

…”With almost a half-million tags and with an online community that loves to engage in keyword and key phrase pollution to be more search engine friendly, I posit that the Technorati tags are a failed experiment and are just going to become increasingly irrelevant as the namespace continues to grow without bounds.”

I think the main issues here is that folksonomies (informal, user-created tagging systems like Technorati tags) and predetermined taxonomies (like the Yahoo directory) serve different purposes.

I explained this in the following comment to Dave’s posting…

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Amy's Adventures, Amy's Grab Bag (quick notes), Feeds (RSS), Labels and Metadata, Resources 4 Comments

My New Recommended Reading Lists

The more I use the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us, the more I’m getting to like it – especially when it saves me work.

One task I’m particularly compulsive about is sharing with CONTENTIOUS readers links to interesting sites, articles, tools, and books. For awhile I’d been presenting these as my “grab bag” articles, but that process was too labor-intensive for me to maintain.

So now I’ve figured out how to use del.icio.us to keep you up to date on all the cool content I’m encouraging you to explore…

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