Tags and clouds

You may have noticed that most wikis off the main Venice 2.0 dashboard have a del.icio.us symbol in the side panel (I've yet to put one on this blog). This is so you can leverage the power of community tagging instead of simply bookmarking the site. I'm unsure just how useful this feature will be for the restricted domain in which the Venice 2.0 wikis are being used, but the concept of social tagging will play a powerful role later on in the Venice 3.0 future, especially in the creation of folksonomies within LOUIS (Local Online Urban Information System). Blogger employs internal tags that are not "collaborative", but set by the bloggers themselves (less useful). The tag cloud at the side of this blog is a little smarter, since it uses keywords that it extracts from the blog entries instead of relying just on the blogger-defined tags. I used zoomclouds to create it. I think it looks cool and is somewhat useful too. Collaborative tagging and folksonomies will be key technologies for our web 2.0 applications, so keep your eyes open for more on these topics.