Fade to Play

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I gave a presentation at the Media Annotations and Tagging workshop by MAGIC entitled “Playing tag in user-generated spaces” in which I discussed tagging in Facebook and Flickr.

I then attended a photowalk in Gastown (a section of Vancouver) organised by Kris Krüg that evening and afterwards we uploaded our photos to Flickr and and Facebook using appropriate tags to categorise our content. Some of us also became new friends/contacts on Flickr and Facebook.

After the walk Kris yelled out that we use a standardised tag “gastownphotowalk2″ to link our photos on flickr together. If you attend conferences, workshops, meetups, you will hear the organisers request that a common tag be used to link photos/blog entries related to the event. Although people believe in the power of the folksonomy, a little top-down intervention is very effective and sometimes necessary.

The result of using “gastownphotowalk2″ is that we are one of the hot tags of the last 24 hours on flickr. Sweet.

Check out our photos here.

Relevance: I am finding that I living what I research regarding tagging in flickr and facebook. It helps me better understand the culture of these spaces when I use these spaces daily because of my real world interactions and meetups. Having friends that live in these digital environments is quite beneficial.