Mobtagging the online world
Recently, several popular websites and online communities start offering tagging services to their users. Weblogs, URL’s, photo’s and video’s are already intensively being tagged. Mobtagging proves to be an easy and flexible way of adapting metadata to continuously changing environments. Because of the absence of a central, topdown-structured administration, the user gets to decide how his/her contribution is specified and categorized. Consequently, the information is structured according to the user’s own interests and focus points. By making online information more personal and exchangeable, a database emerges that lacks a dominant hierarchy of terms and subcategories. The threat, on the other hand, is that the practice of tagging tends to turn a large network of information into a chaotic pool of metadata.
Workshop approach
In this workshop we aim to expose the inner workings and social effects of mobtagging: How is social tagging changing our attitude towards the processing and exchange of online information? For which usergroups and applications is mobtagging rewarding? How can we strengthen the advantages and weaken the disadvantages? Also, the practice of applying metadata to physical objects through RFID will be touched upon.