Group items tagged

Create a tagging schema taxonomy: (n) the study of the general principles of scientific classification If you've had anything to do with organizing information, you've heard this term.  In the web world, site managers spend weeks developing classification systems for their content so their search features will work properly.  Now for a new version - folksonomy.  Folksonomy is the same thing as taxonomy only without the education.  Folksonomy describes the grassroots classification systems developing as more and more "tag" platforms appear online.  While some  tags are appearing as standards, it's still quite a free-for-all out there. 

I use Diigo to manage my bookmarks.  Anytime I find a page I want to save, I tell Diigo to bookmark it for me using the tags I assign that page.   Later - when I want a list of all the genealogy blogs I've bookmarked - I just click on my "genblog" tag on my Diigo page to view them. Because I have included surname tags on all the family photos I've uploaded to Flickr, I can send anyone requesting Barker information one link that displays all my Barker photo collection. The related articles section at the bottom of this post was created using Diigo to display all the links I've saved related to a specific topic (tag).

Because I use these systems daily, I've created my own tag system - a folksonomy - that I use across each of the different tagging applications/platforms I use.  For genealogy items I use the following tags: genealogy (for everything genealogy) genblog (any blog dealing with genealogy topics) genapp (genealogy software) gendex (a genealogy index - like Cindi's List) genpub (a genealogy publication) gendata (a genealogy data source) surnames for each family I'm researching location names - city, county and state - for areas I'm researching Every tagging site allows multiple tags.  I bookmark every article I write beginning with my site tag (familymatters for this blog) and then topic specific tags.  That [and Diigo's tools] is how I'm able to collect my earlier posts for a related articles list.  It's so flexible that I can create a list of only my articles or any articles I've bookmarked with a specific topic keyword. Tags are becoming an important component of your research toolbox so spend a few minutes developing a plan - a folksonomy - of keywords for your research.  Anyone who's interested in developing a standard for genealogy tags, please let me know in the comments.  My tags are very handy for my research, but "our" tags can help us all!

Denise Olson from Family Matters and Moultrie Creek commented about her Genealogy Research Resources at Diigo.  I finally visited, registered at Diigo, and joined Denise's group.  Once I joined, I was amazed at all of the resource links Denise has accumulated.  As of this morning, there are 624 bookmarks and usually multiple links within each bookmark.  It's too early in the morning, and I haven't had enough coffee, to focus enough and count all the links, but take my word for it - there are lots. 

All of the bookmarks are tagged by general subject so it's easy to find the your area of interest.  The best part of Diigo and the Genealogy Research Resources group is it's a collaborative environment - if you have some unique resource links you can add them to the group so everyone can make use of them.  I think this is an incredible site, and Denise has put great effort into creating and adding most of the current links. 

REMINDER: There’s two interesting Genealogy Research groups at Diigo. First, there’s the Genealogy Research Resources group which catalogs data sites like archives and libraries. This group has a significant collection of useful sites. Then there’s the Genealogy Research Support group for links to how-to articles and videos, software vendors and reviews. Anyone can take advantage of these resources and if you’d like to add to the collection, all it takes is a free Diigo account.

Building a Grassroots Research Directory As part of my tag housekeeping chores, it dawned on me that the new groups feature in Diigo can be put to good use in developing a genealogy research directory.  I've created two groups FL Genealogy Resources and GA Genealogy Resources and I've been adding links I've already collected to them. 

This example shows the Florida group page.  Using the tag "cloud" on the right, you can select the topic that most interests you to see the links available.  The size of the font quickly tells you which tags have the most links.  Yes, this is a pretty basic directory at this point, but as more people join this group and add their own links it will increase in value - a grassroots effort.  My first group experiments are set up for state resources.  Florida and Georgia are my biggest research areas and I'm a native Floridian so I've got the skinny on resources in my area. I don't have to suggest a link be added and then hope someone posts it, I just do it myself.  In the process, I'm adding value for all researchers.  Tagging sites like Diigo give us the opportunity to share our knowledge with those we know - and those we don't.  With little effort on our part, we can build a valuable research network letting everyone participate and benefit from the results.

Diigo Debuts WebSlides - The Ten-Minute Preso Fix Normally, I wouldn’t pop a vendor’s release in the Exclamation blog, but I really think that Diigo has come up with a pretty novel idea. Slideshows, when they’re good, tell a story. And that’s exactly what Exclamation is about - telling kick-ass stories. This morning, Diigo officially released WebSlides. They’re probably hanging out at Office 2.0 right now, basking in the glory of their slideyness. This release puts social tagging and bookmarking a little bit closer to the average joe, as it lets them enjoy the benefits of the medium without having to learn the guts of how it works. Here’s a good example of how WebSlides looks: a slideshow on genealogy 2.0. We’ve been using Diigo here at LaunchSquad for about five months, and while we normally use it to forward cool sites around the office (and share with clients), there are some pretty solid applications for marketing, PR, social media and communications here too. WebSlides allows the user to make a slideshow of anything they tagged in Diigo. So, for example, if you have about 10 minutes and a decent wireless connection, you can prepare a narrated clip portfolio to show some of your company’s work (e.g. great articles written about your company or your clients). As long as these sites are already bookmarked in Diigo, you can pop them into the drag-and-drop interface and create the show very quickly; a web-slides feature has always been an Achilles heel of PowerPoint. (Well, geez, one of many - who am I kidding, here?) WebSlides differs from, say, Slideshare, because (1) it’s not just for uploading pre-existing Pages or PowerPoint presentations into a slideshow. It’s meant for making web-clipping slideshows, quickly. Not to diss Slideshare too much; they’re good for what they are - a post-presentation YouTube - but you really can’t make anything that looks too polished due to their bric-a-brac UI. For the time being, I’d go easy on using sound and narration gratuitously on WebSlides, as it doesn’t seem to have quite caught up with the rest of the product, but Diigo is usually good about fixing all bugs in a few weeks. WebSlides is a practical innovation from a company that’s been percolating with good ideas for some time now.

Diigo Introduces WebSlides Sep 6th, 2007 by moultriecreek The folks at Diigo have been busy adding new features to their research-friendly bookmark platform. Today they introduced WebSlides which allows users to select a group of bookmarks, arrange them in a specific order and turn them into a slideshow. What is really cool about this is viewers are looking at a show of live sites - not screenshots. Slideshow creators can include background music - or even narration - to the show although trying to keep the audio and video synched is a stretch. WebSlides is still in beta, but you can view several sample slideshows to get a feel for the system. One of them is even about genealogy.

Wow is not a good enough word for this! lol I enjoyed your WebSlide presentation…. Janice

It was a lovely presentation, indeed! And thank you for featuring my little home town’s website as an example; I got TONS of people stopping by and taking a look. Much appreciated!

We have all found directories like Cyndi's List to be valuable assets in our family research efforts.  Unfortunately, these directories require lots of maintenance and since most of these are volunteer efforts, it can take weeks to get new sites included.