July 12, 2006

The Art of Community Tagging for Dance Events

If you are involved in a dance performance where you expect and want audience members and dancers to take a lot of pictures and post them to the web, then it's important to make sure that Internet users can find this multimedia content.

For example, in my new Dance That Matters blog, I just wrote a story about a recent community dance project called "One River Mississippi."

This type of site-specific performance that takes place at multiple outdoors locations is ideal for taking a lot of pictures and videos and putting them on the web.

But an important question is: Once people upload their pictures and videos to multiple websites, how can Internet users easily find this visual recap of the One River Mississippi dance performances?

Flickr Picture of "One River Mississippi"
By Bob Morrison Photography

The answer is the use and promotion of a consistent tagging system. If you are promoting a dance performance and you want people to take pictures and videos, then you want to encourage everybody to use the same tags to identify their multimedia content.

For example, in my post about One River Mississippi, I provided a link to the photo site Flickr where there are some pictures of this dance program. The Flickr link I included was for all photos that matched the keywords "one river mississippi." This is not a very precise way to conduct a search - especially if there are a lot of photos on Flickr that for one reason or another have these keywords but have nothing to do with this series of dance performances. As you'll see on the search results on Flickr, after the first seven matches, the pictures do not have anything to do with this program.

What would be better is if everybody who took pictures of this event simply used the same pre-determined tag for all their relevant photos. The tag might be "onerivermissdance2006". This way anybody interested in this event could search Flickr and other multimedia sites for pictures and videos of these dance performances.

There is also another important benefit to promoting on your website this common tagging scheme before the start of a dance event. If you encourage visitors to your website to take pictures and videos of the performances and then upload them to various websites, you'll get a lot more exposure and publicity for your event - all because you're promoting a standardized approach to tagging.

Then during and after your performance, you can add links to photo and video sharing websites where user multimedia content of your event is uploaded. You only have to create a single link for each site because all users will be tagging this content with the same keyword.

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