Tag: nv08

A Useful New Tagging Book

As I me mentioned in one of my recent posts, I just read Gene Smith’s book: Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. Great overview of tagging for both practice as well as some more detailed professional work. Lots of good stuff in the book, including a discussion about tags (of course), taxonomies, folksonomies, metadata, controlled vocabulary, and countless examples to illustrate his work. Speaking at times in the voice of a teacher and at other times as a software developer, I feel I have a better understanding of tag clouds and how useful these features can be from a personal as well as social media perspective. In the process of reading this, I decided to begin using the tagging feature built-into WordPress, as now I think in the long-term this will be useful for me as well as my colleagues. Score one for Gene’s persuasion.

One of the topics Gene mentioned involved using capital letters, abbreviations, and underscores / hyphens. His suggestion that the decision about how to handle this issue should be addressed at the beginning. I thought this was good advice, but for my own use I wish he would have suggested what he recommends in this case (in the teacher voice, not the developer voice). taggingI understand the differences between various formats, such as: New York, new york, NY, ny, New_York, new-york, etc., but I am not sure which option(s) I should use. I could have used some end-user guidance here as opposed to be left to discern all my options. In this case, I find myself being inconsistent in how I tag my own blog posts and Flickr images, as I tend to second-guess how others may search for and use the tags.

This is one of the questions I will ask him when I listen to his presentation at Northern Voice next week. I just learned that Gene will be presenting at Internet Bootcamp as well, so it will be nice to meet him so close to my finishing his book.

I think this book will do well, as I can only imagine tagging options and needs to increase in the future. As much as consistent tags seem like a good idea, I often find myself thinking about terms and usage in different ways from other people. No wonder I am a qualitative researcher!

Northern Voice Facts

Northern Voice 2008Thank you, Darren Barefoot, for creating a one-pager of specifications and historical information about Northern Voice 2008.  

Darren is one of the architects who brought Northern Voice into existence several years ago, and has managed to get me to plan traveling back there, for a second time, all the way from New York.

While billed as Canada’s personal blogging and social media conference, this is a friendly and very informative (in a pleasant networking) environment, where I will be presenting some work on Liveblogging in the conference’s first ever Internet Bootcamp.  

I can’t believe the conference is next week; I am sure in two weeks from now I will be bursting with ideas and next steps and suggestions and resources and new contacts / colleagues / friends. If only all conferences I attend could net so much.

Liveblogging 101

Our long-awaited presentation we are doing at this year’s Northern Voice has finally appeared on their website. As an all-volunteer conference, I really appreciate all the work and efforts the organizers are giving to make this year’s personal blogging and social media conference a success.

My session will be on Friday, February 22, 2008, from 14:00 – 14:30 (2:00-2:30pm) in a new track–Internet Bootcamp. Entitled Liveblogging 101, it is meant to introduce newbies to liveblogging.

As a technologist and qualitative researcher, I am really interested in how liveblogging is an act of involvement and participation. It is not a narrative of the events–that is stenography. It is an interactive co-creation of the event itself from the perspective of an active participant. This in fact summarizes what my blog title, Silence and Voice, is all about. With liveblogging, the silence is ended as participants take up and use their own voices to record the event as they experience it.

Liveblogging:  Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. If you want it nice and neat, buy a book.

Technorati Tags: ,,

The New York Times Liveblogs?!

Nice to know that my interest in liveblogging and my newspaper of record, The New York Times, has finally embraced technology enough to begin liveblogging. Not just in name, but in practice. It seems they are liveblogging today’s Florida Primary.

With real-time video, one may ask why anybody would be interested in liveblogging at all? If that is the case, you may be interested in my upcoming session at Northern Voice’s Internet Bootcamp, where I will be presenting a session entitled Liveblogging 101.

Liveblogging:  Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic.

 

Northern Voice Bootcamp, Here I Come!

I am planning to attend this year’s Northern Voice 2008 in Vancouver. I will be presenting, with my colleague Robin Yap, at a new feature in the Moosecamp unconference, called Internet Bootcamp.

The proposal that Robin and I submitted is:

northernvoice2008square2.jpgLiveblogging as Active Participation

Do you want to actively report, interpret, and comment upon what happens around us in real time? Think only professional journalists can do this? If so, then think again! Liveblogging is a term for when people blog about events and presentations as they unfold, with all the personal feelings and thoughts through which we see the world. Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. Liveblogging is active involvement, allowing us to both co-creator our meaning while we publish it on blogs in real time. This session will explore how people liveblog, its usefulness in an age of social media, and some best practices. A future research agenda will be also be explored.

This has not appeared on their website yet, but that is indeed what we are working on.

Do you liveblog? If not, consider attending our session! If you do, do you have any suggestions or recommendations about how or what we cover? This is something that many people do, and we are hoping we can create a forum to talk about this. Hopefully we can learn something from one another!