New Media Workshop

Finally I am tagging articles, a year or so after my friends are doing so.

Indeed, unlike most classmates, except several like Christina, I do not like tagging at all, nor do I prefer opening a blog account for one course after another.

In the old days, I used to live on my browser, my Favourites saved in my own pc and thats all. Now I have a dozen of blog accounts which each of them has its own account name and passwords. It is so frustrating when I have to go to Wordpress and Uniblog and Delocious and etc etc in order to do something I have always managed well.

The most mysetrious part of tagging to me is that why don’t I just add the page I consider useful to my Favourites? Yes maybe someone will prefer reading what others are reading, but not me, nor do I like the fact that any other could easily get all kinds of materials that I am reading. I don’t like to share the readings in this way.

Anyways, for academic purpose, it is rather a good way for research and so on.

Here is my delicious page.

My topic is about temperature change in HK for the past decade.

Ok, so I started to search climatechange on Technorati. Guess what, the first blog post appeared is one of the Windows Live Spaces called Michaels’s space, and the scond, Macro’s Blog which I simply couldn’t assess how much he knows about the topic. Authorities may not always be the right places we refer to, but still some kind of credibility is assured. Therefore, while some students suggested that while Google is hit-oriented, Technorati is quality oriented. I totally doubt this.

When I search with the exact wordings in Google, the first articles was that from BBC, the second from EU and the third, EPA from U.S. Obsiouly, if one is working on a formal and serious reasearch and so, he should use Google in that sense.

Anyway, as discussed in Foust’s text, all these new technologies are actually providing different ways for journalistic research. In fact, while large scale and commonly discussed topics like climatechange could we rely more on Google and other similar search engines, we should also note that for smaller scale ones, or something new, probably those materials will appear first in blogs. If that is the case, tagging would be an ideal method to be used.

One thing some of us also concern is that what kind of wordings should we use when we are searching stuff. HongKong or Hong Kong or HK? Yet this is something technical, most probably in the near future all those different ‘HK’ would direct users to the same category. Therefore it will not be something we need to worry much.

Besides, for individuals, we should also pay attention to the fact that there are more opportunities provided by the tagging system. As Rebecca told us in last lecture, news organisations searching materials for specific topics may eventually come to something uploaded by individual journalists. In such cases, an individual may well be contacted and work as a freelance journalist in some way.

Tagging? Honestly, I prefer using it occasionally than contributing to it constantly.