Learning 2.0: tagging fun

What a delight to read the Learning 2.0 lessons on tagging from our Technical Services Coordinator, Margaret! Here goes; my sample search for lesson 12, exercise 1 is (what else?): harry potter.

1. Google finds "about" 125,000,000 hits (only 119,000,000 if I search as a phrase).
2. our library catalog, eQuest, finds 39 hits in a keywords search (harry AND potter).
3. when I search Harry Potter as a subject, I get, sadly, zero. Aren't there books *about* Harry Potter that we own? Aren't the Harry Potter books *about* Harry Potter? Trying (and failing, I think) to think like an undergraduate, here.

What parallels do I see between the catalog and tagging on the web? I'm not sure I it's fair to draw parallels between searching Google and eQuest for harry potter and the tagging found there, because I have no way of knowing where Google is finding those words in those pages. I think a fitter comparison might be between flickr and eQuest. When I search flickr for Harry Potter, I get 85,559 images--including one of my own! That's still vastly more than eQuest. It's still sort of apples and oranges to compare flickr images--of course I'll find more hits among the bajillion flickr images than our million-odd records. Anyway, looking at the results that I get on flickr, I see harry and/or potter in tags, titles, descriptions and notes.

Exercise 2 has us reviewing the tags that we use on our blogs, flickr images and in our librarything catalog. I'm all over the tagging map. I'm most consistent in flickr, where I definitely want to go back and find things: my most common tags are "ak," "b" and "daughter," which makes perfect sense, as they are my most-frequently-photographed subjects. I use tags in librarything to give books ratings, rather than using the rating system; I'm not surprised that my biggest tags there are threestars, to_read, wishlist (where I used to keep my to_read stuff!) and scifi.

One last tidbit on tagging: it's common for flickr photographers to inject a little humor by using funny tags.