Couldn't see any difference when I searched blog posts by keyword and then searched tags. There were significantly fewer hits for the tags search. Oddly enough, when I searched several times, for blog posts (for "school library learning 2.0") the number of hits kept changing. Maybe that indicates that the number of posts out there are changing by the second. The search of tags got me more specific hits. Tagging definitely rocks!
I'm still feeling my way with tagging. I do like the ability to search tags to see what others have posted. However, I am a library cataloger. I am torn. On the one hand, I love the freedom of creating my own tags, making my own individual connections. In my very own filing cabinet, I have some pretty exotic file names. However, others don't always see things the way I do. That is positive and negative in my opinion. Positive because I can express myself and have my tags intuitive to me and easy to find. ( I have often chaffed again the strange, arbitrary subject headings demanded by cataloging standards. Bildungsromans, for crying out loud, what elementary school kid, or high-schooler for that matter, is going to look that up to find books about coming of age. These headings keep book searches for the elite and the librarians. Why not include "coming of age" as a heading since we are no longer limited to the space of a file card?) Positive because I can explore the tags of others and learn. But the cataloger in me says, oh my god, how can we find things without consistency and rules of some kind? The negative is that this way of categorizing posts, etc. feels like chaos and can be very frustrating when trying to locate something that someone else has tagged. As I get more familiar with tagging, though, I see that this is a great way to explore. I have my own bookmarks and posts tagged in my own unique way, without having to squeeze myself into someone else's idea of what tags should be, and I can share these with the world. As long as I am not trying to lay my "hands" on something specific quickly, I can explore other's tags. The tag cloud is an ingenious way to help with that exploration. I can choose the tags that the majority have used or experiment with those that only a few on the edges of the tag world have used.
As my mind is expanding, this tagging is growing on me. Who knew?
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