Stumbled across a number of interesting sites today while searching for an audio tagging tool… and quickly realised that audio tagging can mean several things. Most often its associated with the ID3 tags associated with MP3 files such as artist, song etc and there’s numerous tools which allow you to do that. However, what I was more interested in finding was a tool which allows you add your own tags to describe an audio file. Ideally a web based one like an audio version of Flickr so you can add your own tags as well as see the other tags put by others to that file. I’m sure there’s a website that does this out there, I’ve just found it yet. Yet if you change your search to “audio annotation tagging” this makes it really interesting and finding tools which allow you to annotate an audio file (eg speech, song, music) as it plays so you can find.
One such is Project Pad2 (http://dewey.at.northwestern.edu/ppad2/) which looks very promising offering annotation for video, audio, images and transcription files. Project pad is linked to another resource which I’ll be wanting to keep track of
The Sakai project (http://www.sakaiproject.org/) which is a Collaboration and Learning Environment for Education and if that was not enough free to use and develop. I must admit I’ve not given myself the time to try it yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
One tool I am already trying is Zotero (http://www.zotero.org). A research tool application that plugs in directly to Firefox or Flock. What it does is provide an interface that is part of the browser allowing you to catalogue both on and offline resources in various ways such as online academic journals, web pages as well as materials on your hard drive, but also make notes, highlight text, and integrate these in documents as references. There is also apparently a more collaborative version coming out later in 2008, allowing you to share resource references. So watch this space. I’ll update these pages as I explore Zotero’s functionality more.