Tagging, the book
So my book, Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web is finally done and available for order from your favorite bookstore:
- Amazon.com
- Amazon.ca (Currently #485 in books)
- Chapters/Indigo
- Amazon UK (only 2 left in stock!)
- Amazon Germany (#1 in Non-fiction > Social Sciences > Communication > Technology and Society)
- Amazon Japan (#13 in Non-fiction > Social Sciences > Communication > Technology and Society)
If you're an information architect, user experience designer, web designer, product manager or developer it will tell you everything you need to know to design a tagging system. It covers tagging from broad concepts right down to the specifics of interface design and even code. It also deals with issues of social web design, like popularity, social discovery and recommendations, that are germane to tagging. Finally, I tried to touch on some of the broader social trends--like emergence of a ubiquitous, always-on information environment--to which tagging is connected.
I've also created a website where I'll be posting some of the cutting-room-floor material from the book.
On a personal note, I'm grateful to everyone who helped me through this project. It was more challenging than I imagined when I started. There isn't a large body of research around tagging and there is no widely accepted "tagging theory," and that made planning and organizing material quite difficult. Much of the conventional wisdom, if you can call it that, around tagging is being challenged by new (and actually quite fascinating) applications of the basic tagging techniques. Librarything, Wesabe, PhotoShelter, Buzzillions are all pushing the envelope of social metadata. This is great, but it made writing the book (and also, feeling confident about the material in the book) harder than it might otherwise be.
Still. I'm happy it's done. I hope you'll find it useful, and buy several copies. Actually, if you're a person of influence and you want a review copy, drop me a line: atomiq [at] gmail.com.
