Blogging Assignment 4.1
It really cost me not a short time to tag the meaningful information for my final project—Chinese medicine on del.icio.us, because the results of searching for the words —the tag “Chinese medicine”, are not satisfying.
Then I tried another way: I search “Chinese medicine” in the whole website, which means any contents, with or without tags but containing the key words, will be singled out. The results with useful information this round, however, are not tagged with “Chinese medicine”.
I tagged the results as “Chinese medicine” and added the results to Your Favorite and they also replenish the limited information about the key words on this website.
In terms of my observation, I feel that the tag, to some extent, is playing with words. Different people can tag the same article with various words based on their understanding and preference of the content, and it will have an impact on obtaining effective sources. If I just search for the tagged “Chinese medicine”, the results turn out to be useless, and this gives an important hint that only using tags will omit things that may be related to your subject.
In fact, my project is about Chinese medicine in Hong Kong, but I cannot find any related items both on Del.icio.us and Techonorai . Basically, I only use the two websites as a supplement to my perception of the topic.
When searching for the tagged key words via Techonorai, it showed 687 blog posts in text plus 20 posts in video and 250 photos.
Compared with Del.icio.us, Techonorai offers flexible choices for users in view of its three types of information. However, all the contents of Techonorai are in the form of blog, while its counterpart has official websites, which can be used as valid sources for users.
Google “Chinese medicine” , 25,400,000 related items appeared , and I skimmed several pages and quite a lot of the results are links to all kinds of Chinese medicine school around the world. To me, the results are too broad and monophonic to make a sense.
However, when I google “Chinese medicine inHong Kong”, it provided a bunch of websites reflecting the key words, which are definitely meet my demand. Seeing this, I come to a conclusion that Google is a more advanced searching engine, compared with Del.icio.us and Techonorai, which can narrow down the searching scale with more specific key words. The more information in details you can provide, the more content results you may acquire.
In the mean time, Del.icio.us and Techonorai, mainly searching via tags, as mentioned in Tagging and Why it Matters , with which can sort a kind of bookmarks and aggregate them in a particular world, also can be regarded as a shared world. At this point, the tag is an appealing tool.
Nevertheless, I still believe that since not all the people can be in line with a thing, personal views often lead to diversified tags towards the same thing, which is absolutely confusing for the users.
March 8th, 2007 at 1:58 am
It’s interesting how different students are having very different experiences and making different conclusions about technorati and del.icio.us depending on their topics.
I can see how technorati and del.icio.us might not have born much fruit for your topic. Those services are quite good on topics in which many users are interested in, but not so much on other topics that the current user base isn’t focused on.