The first is tag-grabbing. FreshTags can “grab” tags from search queries, and some other sites with taggable content, and reflect those “previously viewed” tags on the currently displayed page of your site.

The second mode is tag-passing. FreshTags can “pass” tags between sites that are running the service. As an example, If you expand the “Culture” category on Freshblog, then visit Greg’s Vent blog, you’ll find the “Culture” category there pre-expanded.

The goal of both of these modes of operation is to enable context-sensitive surfing between blogs, and to customize the presentation of your content for the reader.”

Version 0.5 launched this week, and we’re looking for comments / feedback etc. at

http://blogfresh.blogspot.com/2006/01/freshtags-v-05.html

You’re pretty bang on with Rogue Connect. So far (and we’re talking only a fortnight here really, we’ve only promoted this feature to the community) members are preferring to use tagging for fashion entries. The second most favoured use of tagging is tagging people’s profile, but not their own. Checking from the backend it seems the average user who has adopted the feature (and they’ve only been encouraged to from the middle of the week) tags themselves a few times (or not at all) but is more than happy to tag other members a lot more times.

So from that, it seems that people are more comfortable tagging objects (and indirectly tagging the member, the other end of your example would be being tagged ‘baglady’, that would be a pretty big reflection of the person!!).

I haven’t got around to publishing an explanation (the programming is keeping me busy haha); essentially it’s an exclusive social network aimed at the 18-25 market but open to people 16+. People can apply for an account (existing members vote on whether or not they should be given full membership). Existing members can also invite people, they have a limited amount of invites that will gaurntee the person an account, after that the person they invite gets bonus votes (thus making it a lot easier to get in to the site). Fashion is to the site (or at least building to be), what music is to MySpace, and with a fairly simple style blog the response has been pretty positive.

Cheers, Daniel

I am curious what type of tagging will become more popular on your site – tagging profiles, or entries. If I tag someone’s outfit “sexy”, in a way I am indirectly tagging that person “sexy” as well. Its more subtle. I wonder if people will be more comfortable tagging objects (or blog entries referring to objects) rather than people.

Do you have any data on this? Or am I misunderstanding how RogueConnect works?

This was a fairly large consideration for Rogue Connect when we implemented a folksonomy tagging tool little over a fortnight ago.

We havne’t left ours to be completely adhoc, rather when you’re viewing back tags you can actually view them by categories. The two things members can tag at the moment are profiles and fashion blog entries. When you’re viewing all the tags, you have the choice to display one or the other. Maybe you’re only interested in ‘sexy’ people, so you’d select profiles, or if you’re interested in ‘sexy’ outfits, you’d choose fashion entries.

So far the response has been pretty positive to this way of doing it!

That makes my head spin too! There is something fundamentally new going on here with tag based exchange of concepts.

Interestingly, what it most reminds me of is concept & consensys development within small communities, villages – that anthropologists would study. They have their own launguage, concepts etc. Its a tight social network. Tagging makes these geographically spread out groups similar to these villages & tribes – except that instead of conceptual transmission occuring through physical proximity, and conversation – the social formation itself is created by and supported through tags. And the whole process of concept development is accelerated because the speed of exchange and aggregation of trends is accelerated.

Have you thought about what impact tagging will have on learning and community as it becomes more and more mainstream? I feel like it could be significant, and I wish some of the sociologist from the Boomer and early GenX generations would pay attention. There’s something fascinating brewing here…

What really starts to make my head spin is when I start thinking about the shifts in quality of the collective concepts and information, once del.icio.us (or a particular tagging community) reaches a critical mass of the population of the world.