If someone is still asking himself which applications tagging has, apart from Flickr and Del.icio.us, this is a neat example.

Lee Bryant presents BBC Shared Tags a social bookmarking tool build upon BBC News that allows users to tag stories and find news that other users have tagged using similar terms.

BBC Shared Tags is a project that falls inside the BBC Backstage initiative by Tom Loosemore, Ben Metcalfe, and James Boardwell. Its basic idea is providing an API for re-using BBC content and building shiny new things with it.

How it works

Each story is presented with a box in which you can add a tag, see tags others have given, see all tags and view only your tags.

Clicking one of the tags, you can see all the stories (divided in yours and others) tagged with that term.

There is also a tag search functionality (i.e a search for tags not stories) that can act on your users’ tags or the whole tag space.

The prototype uses Ajax to give a real time feedback for the tags you’ve already added and to make your tags visible to other users without requiring a page reload.

Project aims

Project aims were:

1. To allow users to bookmark BBC News stories and organise them using their own categories.

2. To provide related story links based on social tagging rather than dictated by editorial.

3. To link outwards from tags users have applied to see related content from blogs, social bookmarks and photos.

Conclusions

While it’s true that BBC Shared Tags is actually only an experiment, for me it’s clear that a lot of other businesses could benefit from leaving their users leverage tagging to:

• bookmark their content for keeping found things found
• discover content read by others using their tags that matches users mental model better than any librarians’ taxonomy
• remember the reason that took them saving the article for later reading (tags are keywords that communicates significative meaning)

Note that Gmail is using tags instead of categories to make users group their content in a similar way (the biggest difference being that tags you’ve used in gmail are not shared for serendipity discovery).

While the days go on, more and more examples of noteful uses of tags are provided. They’re not a taxonomy-replacer but a complementary and powerful tool towards the users way of thinking and acting on the web.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 15th, 2005 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Information Architecture, Online Resources, External Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.