Piling is a 'blogging' process that involves active reviewing, revisiting and reorganizing tagging practices on one's content. Within the ELGG network, this includes blog posts, files, photos, bookmarks, podcasts, and videos. Piling also involves the active review and reflection of tag clouds (both one's own and others), tagging categories, blog rolls, and Twitter hashtags.

Tagging Practices Within AU Landing Blog

Upon examination of my tags within the AU Landing, (by looking at the Tag Cloud from my dashboard) I realize that the Tag Cloud I have seems all over the map - more than 100 tags have been used, and most of these have been re-used for courses. It prompts me to consider culling some of these less descriptive tags such as draft, or exemplar, or MODEL POST, and impose a more organized structure that reduces the clutter. But how? How are other bloggers within the Landing using tags? Are they as haphazard and randomly assigned as mine?

I begin looking around, and consider Jon Dron's tagging activity based on his Tag Cloud. His Tag Cloud is much more refined, more descriptive. Instead of draft, he re-uses a few common tags in many of his posts. There are a few larger tags easily identifiable in his Tag Cloud. I would like to emulate this practice and simplify the Tag Cloud for easier retrieval and re-use.

I have noticed, though, that I had used similar tags, with slightly different wording - kind of confusing and messy. For example, I use blogging, edublogging, edublogs, blogs, blogging...a lot of variations. So I will definitely want to re-name these basic concepts using more generic tags, such as ACADEMIC BLOGGING - perhaps I should use capitals for tags that in wordpress would serve as categories.

I would about how how other edubloggers are using wordpress and categorizing their blog posts. For example, Terry Anderson and George Siemens have wordpress blogs. How are they using tags and categories?

Terry Anderson makes use of specific categories that I could adopt for use as tags in my AU Landing blog: PLEs, Personal, and Educational Social Software.  

George Siemens makes use of certain categories I would like to use as tags within ELGG: presentations, conferences, technologies (ie. Twitter, FaceBook). Useful tags include Technologies, Tools, Trends, Blogging, and Uncategorized.