In the world of tag metadata - folksonomies, fauxonomies, etc. - there are a few high-profile services and a million up-and-coming. Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Technorati blog posts all use tags to turbo-charge their useful output, increase community involvement, and simplify third party APIs. Many pieces of digital text art in the last two years have centered around the use of publicly available tagging - in particular search visualizations and generators.
In general, however, the tags tends to be a second-order supporter of digital art, not the focus. I have not yet seen a poem or a short story written entirely in tags. There are some intriguing possibilities - for example, TiddlyWiki supports tagging of individual entries in a way that might help the development of tagged wikifiction - but so far the artistic excitement and energy around tags seems to be around the infrastructure enabled by them or the data visualization techniques built on top of them, not making specific statements through them.
There are however a few examples of writing with tags, rather than above or around them. One is the header of We-Make-Money-Not-Art, which uses a tag-cloud navigation display in lieu of a subtitle, tagline, about blurb, or anything describing what the site is and what it does. The tag cloud is an organically changing navigation tool, and it is the description of the site as well. (There may be a other sites which do this, or even did it first - I’m just not familiar with them).
Tags: metadata, poetry, tags
< />< />
to a second, more dramatic example - a recent announcement of an upcoming event on Flickr blog. The announcement was not prose, however, but instead a typical cloud tag, alphabetized, with words scaled and color-coded to show their relative importance. The date, time, event name and hosts jumped ...
Originally posted on WRT: Writer Response Theory by Jeremy Douglass
odys for your iPod encourages viewers to download all six of the newly optimized video art pieces from odys.org, and into iTunes and their iPods. It allows for an even more intimate and physical relationship with his character, as well as a continually growing connection with each vignette.
ed halter