Basque tagging experience

Threads and discussion at delicious-discuss, the mailing list, about tagging styles and strategies.

Brian Del Vecchio talks about group tagging, people tagging things through del.icio.us to be read by an audience elsewhere... He mentions a Basque experiment we launched back in september.

Well, this is to comment that the Basque experiment is very much alive, and it's truly been a succesful initiative so far.

That experiment begun in september and it works smoothly. Today someone group-tagged Charles' and Camilla's wedding plans with sustaturako so it appears here at Sustatu.com's frontpage (last 3 links on the side menu under Jamaika) and here , the Jamaika page

Explained how it works here

As for tagging styles and strategies (the discussion at the list): Basque users tag things like anyone else, I suppose: some using many tags, others using personal keywords... some post specifically for that Sustatu.com experiment,

See http://del.icio.us/tag/sustaturako with some users even using del.icio.us only for that single purpose: make an annotation at Sustatu.com's collective section. Look at http://del.icio.us/Itzala

I suspect that this Itzala must be a del.icio.us user with another more public username (logged in Firefox, for instance) and then this alternate username just for the purpose of feeding Sustatu. The username is suspicious, also, meaning the Shadow in Basque...

What Basque users do really do different from most del.icio.us users is take some time typing personal titles and descriptions in Basque. We do take time describing what we find... Most people don't.

There's also been a surge in Basque usage of del.icio.us since this was used in Sustatu.com, and a core of highly interconnected Basque users has risen: interconnected, but not necessarily openly. My del.icio.us/rss/luistxo feed has 31 Bloglines subscribers, but I only know 6 of the public ones...

However, that has resulted in high repetition patterns among Basques. If some Basque has tagged X, you may expect others may probably do so. For instance, this Spanish page... 8 people has bookmarked it. 4 of them have commented it in Basque, and of the others, two are Basques that I know.

So, what does all this mean? Don't know for sure, but del.icio.us rocks, the collective usage of it is a very practical thing, and we only need 3 things: i18n, i18n, and l10n (the latter, leave it to us, make del.icio.us openly translatable and it will be in Basque, guaranteed).

We, in the meantime, keep working. Just launched a Basque newsfeed aggregator last week, Aurki.com , sort of Bloglines, Google News and Planet Planet all in one: a public aggregator and newsreader for 150 or so Basque RSS feeds of the net. We had a doubt: should we add RSS feeds of Basque del.icio.us users?

We finnally decided for a bunch of tag RSS feeds for a specific section Charles and Camila also present there, of course... sustaturako is the single Basque word more tagged...

The bunch of selected Basque tags is: journalism, For Sustatu, pictures, Basque (in English and/or French), blogs, Basque (in Basque) and books.