imran*

Mary Hodder’s session on tagging and identity, builds on some of the work from the Identity 2.0 movement, proposing that tagging has value for annotating rich media. Technorati’s tags provide a partial solution but doesn’t address how people wish to include tags on their own site, but still participate in communities.

In usabilities, bloggers requested:

• Trusted tags.
• Tags that didn’t require links.
• Tags with flexibility to mobilise tags from the issuing site.
• Visibility vs. everybody.
• Make their own tag clouds for their blogs.
• Easier, automated systems.
• Tagging objectgs separately from other posts.

65% of Technorati tags are drawn from blog categories, running to about 10m a month. User’s of Hodder’s own Dabble.com tag around 53%of their content. Media from third-parties tends not to be tagged – also the richer the media, the closer to 100% the tagging draws.

Dabble users tend to look at tags and the duration of video clips in order to make decisions about whether to view the content.

iTags are Hodder’s solution – encompassing a subject+verb model:

• Tags.
• Identity (blog URL, known identity, pseudonym, privacy+permissions).
• Creative Commons licensing.

Hodder sees value in itags to express licensing to aggregators, uncoupling an object from URLs and move to XRIs for structured identity that indicate media and licensing data.

Interestingly, itags’ development team includes Kaliya Hamlin, one of the contributors to YADIS, indicating that our work on Simpatico (using LID) could be extended with itags.