We smoked the dope but . . .

Despite great enthusiasm and heroic effort, they met with failure and disappointment. I'm talking about Greg and Richard whose dedication to event tagging (at CIL and SLA respectively) has been of on-going interest to me. I wanted their efforts to succeed because I had seen what looked like success elsewhere (Northern Voice) to great effect. But in both cases the technology proved to be unreliable, including spotty or unreliable indexing of tags and the lack of involvement by others to adopt the use of the tags for their pics, links and blog entries.

Noticing that this has now happened twice, being unwilling to give up on what seems like a good idea, and hoping to find an explanation for the discrepancy between other's experiences and those in my own profession, I thought it might be helpful to ask those who have had success in event tagging for any feedback on their experiences and how these might speak to the problems that library bloggers have had.

I'm thinking in particular of people I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog, Brian Lamb and Alexandra Samuels, simply because they have already drawn attention to tagging as a good thing in relation to Northern Voice. I hope that either they or someone else who was involved might be so kind as to share some of their experience with myself and other librarians who are interested in tagging but haven't seen it work on a consensus basis yet.

On a brief aside, in my explorations of the Northern Voice site, I came across Stephen Downes' presentation on community blogging. Tagging come up for some sharp critique. I didn't read it carefully, but my fascination with tagging would not be kept honest if I didn't provide a link here to Stephen's text version of the presentation. Community Blogging.