Instructions to participants

I will email you four blocks of web addresses to tag. Each block will have 10 items in it. I will email the blocks one at a time until you have done all four - or as many as you can. What I want you to do is to browse to the web address, become familiar with the content on it and then save it to your delicious account in whatever fashion works best for you. Each time you bookmark a web address on delicious, I would like you to add one or more tags to the entry. In addition, I would like you to put a brief comment in the “notes” box explaining your choice of tags. Once you’ve done your 10, please let me know by email so I can arrange the next block.

Please don’t worry about whether or not your tags are “correct”; just tag in the way that you would normally. Obviously, if you’re not familiar with tagging you might feel uncertain about whether or not you’re doing it “right”, however our aim is not judge your tagging abilities. There is no right or wrong way to tag. Similarly, please don’t agonise over accurately explaining what you did in the notes box. I can always ask you if it’s not clear to me.

If at any point you wish to go back and edit your tags, please make a note in your notes box of what you did, when you did it and why. For example, you might add “Feb 25, changed “footle” to “toofoo” because I realised that there is no such thing as a footle.

If you want to see some examples, I’ve included a couple of screen shots of tagging in action using the delicious extension. The first shows an example of a site being tagged.

The next shows the same delicious bookmark being revised at a later date.

Some hints and tips

Some of the web addresses we will circulate will refer to whole sites and others just to a single page or part of a page. Please don’t feel that you must read every thing on a site. If you don’t know the site already, then have as much of a look around as you like but don’t spend more time than you can manage on it. We don’t want to have the tagging to become a chore; hopefully you’ll even find some of the material interesting.

If we send you a site that you already know, please tag it for your experiment account without reference to how you previously tagged it in the first case. Afterwards you can go back and edit it if you like.