During the “Jessamyn and Jenny” show at the Internet Librarian conference, I was very glad Jessamyn emphasized that our interest in tagging and folksonomies does not mean we advocate doing away with structured classification or searching. Instead, we see them as complementary, especially if tagging helps users in ways Dewey and LCSH can’t.

So it’s fun to watch new tagging sites and tools springing up. Now there’s one that combines several of my interests at the moment: social software, tagging, and gaming!

Where Tagging Works: Searching for a Good Game

“Millions of Games is just what it suggests: A search tool for finding all manner of games on the internet. What makes it different from other similar sites is that users are encouraged to tag games (this is called ‘mogging’ a game). And with Millions of Games, most of the heavy-lifting for creating tags has already been done by the developers of the site.

The site uses controlled vocabulary (called ‘Gameology’) to describe categories (arcade, shooter, puzzle, etc). Although you can also add your own free-form tags, these category tags are well known to most users, so there's little ambiguity about what the tags mean….

Tagging on Millions of Games isn't perfect, but in general it does seem to work better than other services that aren't as narrowly focused. And the extra information you get on each game, like ratings, the number of people who have mogged a game, its thumbnail image and so on lead to an overall quite good search experience (not to mention a lot of fun new ways to waste time, if you're into gaming).” [SearchEngineWatch]

Here’s another fun one to play with:

Pudding in a TagCloud

“Thanks to Google Blogoscoped for reminding me about TagCloud, which generates clouds of tags based on RSS feeds you specify. The service is free and available at http://www.tagcloud.com/

TagCloud allows you to provide lists of RSS feeds. From there it'll extract the relevant information and generate "clouds" of tags based on the feeds. In addition to being heaps of syntax fun, this strikes me as in interesting way to broadly compare the content of different news sites/blogs.” [ResearchBuzz]

In a quick bit of fun, I set up clouds for TSL, my subscriptions in my aggregator, and MLS (MPOW). Just for fun, I threw one together for bloggers I heard speak at the 2005 Internet Librarian Conference.

We’ve finalized the program for the MLS Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium and added the descriptions of the presentations we have so far. We should have the last of the info posted in the next day or two. It’s amazing how fast the time goes when planning the day’s events! Registration is still open, so sign up today!