Conference Tagging

I just finished a paper on the tagging effort at the AoIR 6.0 conference, which I hope to be able to share some time soon (which, in the academic world, means a few months). It’s a pretty limited data set, but it’s interesting nevertheless. Basically, we encouraged conference attendees to tag blog posts (using Technorati), bookmarks (del.icio.us) and photos (Flickr) using the tags aoir and aoir6, so you can see the results at those sites. We also did two surveys to see what people thought of the whole thing which was, of course, the key part of the research.

I have seen a number of attempts to use specific tags to bring bits of info together - most successfully on Flickr, with just a quick search revealing that desktopshowandtell has been in use well over a year now, which makes some sense given its promotion on kottke. I’ve also seen some, mostly smaller & tech oriented conferences using tags to bring some info together. In the paper I try to add a few ideas about practical implementation at a conference & make more info about one particular case available.

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You’re currently reading “Conference Tagging,” an entry in technology and the social, the blog of Ericka Menchen Trevino

Published:: 12.19.05

Tags: Research, Tagging

Prentiss Riddle 01.27.06 / 8am

Ericka, I stumbled into your blog via your del.icio.us survey and I’m pleased to see that you’re looking at this question.

My employer, Shadows.com, is running an experiment in encouraging tagging at the upcoming South By Southwest conference and festival here in Austin. We did an ad hoc survey of how people have already been tagging and otherwise abbreviating the names of the bands coming to SXSW and put together a list of “official” SXSW tags. We’ve been seeding the process by tagging band websites into Shadows but don’t mean this to be an intra-Shadows thing. There’s always a lot of Flickr activity surrounding SXSW and we hope people will use this list as a guide wherever they tag.

It will be interesting to see whether the idea catches on. We hope that since SXSW opens with the very tag-aware Interactive portion of the conference the idea may at least reach the early adopters.

I look forward to seeing the results of your AoIR study and welcome any thoughts you might have on our little project.

And by the way, the consensus tag for the whole SXSW experience seems to be “sxsw2006″. The four-digit version is leading over “sxsw06″ everywhere we’ve looked, and that was the case in 2005 as well.

technology and the social

Conference Tagging

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