Yes, I’m two and a half years late to this thread, but tag clouds are indeed the new mullets! IÂ couldn’t resist enabling the tag cloud widget for WordPress. You can see the tag cloud on the left of this blog, if you scroll the page. So far I’ve tagged three entries just to goof around.
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The new mullets! Most people have no clue how to do tags, so they go all over the place. CiteUSeek won’t even let me delete wrong tags!
Plain folks who think have asked how to tag effectively. They assume that, because I teach cataloging, I know!
I am thinking particularly of the student who managed my lab for five years, fell in love with all things Mac, and spent his spare time taking and sharing photographs on his own blog. After a while, he wanted to create tags that really did something productive.
Non-plain folks have been asserting rules of varying value.
Plain folks have invented merged words, CamelFont, idjit words that they like, understand or can remember (Whats a mullet?). Non-plain sometimes deride.
Hey! Naked emperor really resonates – should it be two tags? “naked” “emperor” ??? What else might I want to combine with naked? Do I need naked for the idea? Aren’t all emperors naked?
If we shortcut to lower case for everything, what should have upper case? Camels? Or camels for camels and Camels for Camels. Dromedaries anyone??
Will naked+emperor morph to an idea more easily expressed in my records as ne? nemp?? Will the people who network with me follow suit?
If we stick with the idea of free flowing folksonomies, language change is likely to accelerate. All we need are the software people to put the popular options in front of us and Lakatos proff and refutation will rule. Should that have been “proof?” Or can I rely on Google to interpret my error?
If we want to help plain folks tag, it may well be that we offer some -simple- frameworks, e.g., metadata categories for images. Good luck! Or, just the simplest heuristics:
– see what others have done, change it if you don’t like it, stick with it if you do
-try to be consistent, consolidate occasionally
-dump the environments that constrain you
-look for the environments that let you connect to people with interesting tag clouds.
It is probably most useful at the moment to tolerate chaos and see what emerges.
I wonder what you get if you search for nemp+mullets? Who posted those tags? When? What are their other interests? Maybe I missed all the really interesting nakedemperors!
PS I begin cataloging class by using Flickr.
In Australia a mullet is a male haircut associated with a certain type of male and/or the 1980s. Short top and sides, long at the back to cover the exposed neck. Considered rough, pragmatic, working class; generally scorned by urbanites; but now we all look back and laugh like John Cougar Mellencamp and say “remember when…that’s when a smoke was a smoke, and groovin’ was groovin”.