³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Shared tags
We have built a social bookmarking tool just for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News that allows logged in users to tag/bookmark stories and view related stories that other users have tagged using similar terms.
If you go to any story from the front page and login as 'guest'/'guest' then you can start tagging stories and see how other people have tagged the same story.
The protoype uses XML-HTTPRequest to allow users to add tags without leaving the page and it also updates the related stories box based on applied tags so that users can see what others are doing in almost real time.
Users have their own tags page to aggregate bookmarked stories, and they can also view a global tags page showing the most popular and recent tags used by all users. There is also a tag search facility across a users' tags or the whole tag space.
For each 'tag', users can see their own stories and other peoples' stories that have been associated with a term, plus there are feeds from Del.icio.us, Technorati and Flickr that pull in content with similar tags.
Our aims for this protoype were:
1. To allow users to bookmark ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News stories and organise them using their own categories.
2. To provide related story links based on social tagging rather than dictated by editorial. See Tom Loosemore's note here: https://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ideas/archives/2005/03/user_generated.html
3. To link outwards from tags users have applied to see related content from blogs, social bookmarks and photos.
Why build a stand-alone system rather than just use Del.icio.us or Furl? First, to ensure that it is a system for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News stories rather than any content: there is plenty of good content on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News and we thought it would be interesting to let users re-organise it according to their own interests. Second, to create a viable prototype that does not depend / place too much load on external services.
Disclaimer: This prototype was actually commissioned as a piece of work by the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ earlier in the year
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