I like the personalised tagging concept, but you need serious tag volume for it to work - and generating serious user-submitted tag volumes from message board postings might prove hard. What's the end-user benefit to tagging a message board posting? They're not usually things you want to go back and find later (unlike photos or links).
I'm intrigued by auto-tag generation using term extraction software or APIs such as Yahoo's http://developer.yahoo.net/search/content/V1/termExtraction.html , or http://www.tagyu.com I've used the Yahoo Term extractor API on an internal project to auto-generate tags from programme descriptions, and it worked a treat on such keyword-dense text (see http://www.tomski.com/yahoo_demo.html ) You need to prune the tags to get rid of noise (such as "programme", in my example), but it's quick, dirty and seems to work OK. Much Better Than Nothing. You can always let users augment auto-generated tags with their own. I bet running a term extractor over the England message bodies would tag a discussion rather well, provided you tuned & pruned tags at the beginning... And would it might scale better in terms of cost. Hmm, just tried a really clumsy experiment with a thread on the Kent board http://www.tomski.com/yahoo_bbc_demo.html Could be worse... I quite fancy seeing all messages posted on bbc.co.uk/england which are tagged "smeg"... -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of James Sent: 01 November 2005 12:00 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [backstage] Programme Archive/Message Board beta Would it not be more effective by basing the results on what the individual has posted about before ? The same tagging concept could apply but then the results are limited to the tags found in what the user has shown as a previous interest. It's difficult to predict interest just based upon popularity of tags as I imagine there is going to be a huge user base with diverse interests. Design wise: For me it's too tight. The main content body is too small and the amount of scrolling is going to be huge. Jim > > Jem Stone wrote: > > > The challenge they were trying to solve was how to direct users to > multiple threads that they might be interested in across nearly 50 > message boards up and down (in this case) the English regions and > cities. We're hoping that thread/topic tagging might be the way to go. > - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
