Hi, I was just thinking it would be great if people were able to search for stories geographically, by city or region or country. I guess that would be fairly easy if we all started tagging stories with city names, etc. Other option would be in future versions that there would be dropdown menus to ask people when you upload a story where it was made or what area it's about? What do others think? Do we need something to help us figure out how to tag better?
geo tags
yes, excellent idea I think, to add geographical or place tags to every story. 'stories for change' would seem to imply a 'where' at the very least (when's and who's too, for sure). this would also have the added attraction of making possible a visual launcher for the collected stories organized as a clickable map. See for e.g. http://www.west.asu.edu/koptiuch/SAS_f06koptiuch/SAS_map-launch.html Or some energetic person could produce a GIS mapping amenable to topic tag and place tag searches and visualization.
But there's no dropdown tag menu at all, and surely other tag types would be a good idea as well. it appears that this is left up to the user. perhaps the suggestions under the tag slot could include less random examples and more type of tag ideas? perhaps the upload page could include a spatial referent question?
Patience with the Tags field
There isn't a drop down for available tags, but if you're patient enough (depending on the speed of your internet connection) when you type in a possible tag, the site will actually search for similar tags (watch for the spinning blue circle clock) then a dropdown will appear and you could choose a tag already in the database.
AND I think it'd be a great to tag the geographic location.
As far as getting people to tag better, we could add some info in the Help forum or we could try to add more comments asking people to tag more.
-Danielle
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Danielle Martin
VerdeSmoke.com
Masters of City Planning candidate, MIT Dept of Urban Studies & Planning
Project Manager, StoriesForChange.net