TagTeam basics

Jargon

A TagTeam hub is a social-tagging project. It can subscribe to feeds from elsewhere, publish its own feeds, and let approved hub members tag web pages for the hub.
- Hubs get their input from three sources: (1) feeds to which the hub subscribes, (2) tags applied by hub members to external web pages, and (3) tag records imported from other tagging platforms such as Connotea. TagTeam stores all the items from all three sources for deduping, back-up, export, modification, and searching.

A TagTeam item is a tag record. If you tag a news story in TagTeam, the item contains the URL of the story, all the tags you applied to the story, the "description" of the story you may have added at the time of tagging, the fact that you were the one (or one of the ones) who tagged it for TagTeam, and similar info. It does not include the story itself.

The TagTeam bookmarklet is the button on your browser bar that lets you tag web pages. If you have permission to tag for a hub, then you can find the bookmarklet in the "Bookmarks" tab. Near the top of that page is an underlined phrase "Add to TagTeam". Just drag that phrase to your browser bar. If you dn't have permission to tag for a given hub, you will not see that phrase on the hub's Bookmarks tab.

A TagTeam filter is a rule for modifying tags. Hub members with suitable privileges can create filters, for example, to replace a misspelled tag with a correctly spelled tag, to replace a deprecated tag with an approved tag. TagTeam can apply filters to individual items, to individual input feeds, or to the entire hub. Hub owners can use feeds to tidy up a chaotic collection of tags, or (more ambitiously) to control the evolution of a folksonomy of user-defined tags into a standard vocabulary or ontology of project-defined tags.

A TagTeam remix feed is a feed published by TagTeam consisting of some combination of other feeds. If your project has many tags, for example, A, B, C, D, and E, then a remix feed could contain just the items with tags A and B, or just the items without A and not B.

Go to TagTeam and sign up (create an account). If you've already signed up, then sign in.

Once you have an account, you have the right to create your own hubs, tag for your own hubs, add members or users to your hubs, and so on.

If you want to tag for a hub owned by someone else, you will need their permission. (Likewise, if others want to tag for one of your hubs, they will need your permission.)
- To request permission, pick the target hub from the hub menu on the TagTeam front page. Once in the hub, pick the "Contact" tab. Fill out the web form and explain that you'd like to be approved to tag for the project. Note that approval requires an action from hub owner, who may be traveling or crunched. Some will act quickly and some may not.
- TagTeam hubs can publish carefully curated feeds of content relevant to the project. If tagging for a hub did not require permission, then spammers could undermine the value of the project feeds. (You may already know the problem well.) Determined spammers can still request permission to tag for a given hub, and if the crowd for that crowd-sourced project is large, the owners may not personally know all participants and grant permission. But the permission requirement means that TagTeam hub owners can revoke tagging permission from spammers.