Here is a crazy idea, but I wonder what it would look like if we allowed others to add new tags to our entries? If you use Flickr, you might have seen this in action. I think it only works if you are mutual friends with someone, but if I am browsing a contacts page I can simply add new tags to those photos to help with the overall discoverability of them.
Could we do that with our own Blogs at PSU? It would be a bit of a game changer for the PSU Voices concept. Imagine that I come across a post that really should be contributed into a Voices page for psuets... instead of me reporting it and using that tag, I could just add that tag to the original post. Interesting? Make any sense?
In lots of ways, by blogging in the open we are already asking people to learn from our work and reuse that knowledge elsewhere.
I think it would make sense if it was something you could turn on and off as an administrator of the blog. I like the idea.
I think this is a good idea as we continue to push into the whole community/aggregate/PSU Voices arena.
Would tags submitted by another user have to identified as such?
Would community-contributed tags affect the user's tag cloud?
Does this interfere with the personal content management model? I think it would be awesome to allow others to contribute to that tag cloud as my identity.
Does it make for sense to use a model where I can not only add tags to others' entries, but view my own cloud of tags I have added. In other words, I can see a cloud of how Cole has imposed tags on blogs@psu, and a cloud of how Brad has tagged it.
I am thinking of some hybrid of tagging with delicious and adding the tags directly to the content a la flickr.
I saw a presentation from Steve.Museum about creating communal tags or "folksonomies" for museum collections.
http://conference.archimuse.com/jtrants/stevemuseum_research_report_available
They found that 86% of tags people used were not those chosen by curators. If nothing else, it's a good way to determine how your audience is classifying your content.