Allen Gilliland wrote:
i believe this should be inherent to the way we do tag support. any way we allow people to find content via
tags should allow for tag intersections. so you wouldn't need to define a special category called
"Anil's Java Tips" which is a combination of entries tagged with "java" and
"tips" because someone could already get that by using a url like /tags/rss/anil/java+tips
I mostly agree. It's just a question of knowing what combinations are
available and make sense for a given blog. Folders based on tags allow
the blogger to lay down an organization on the most prominent tag
combinations. For small numbers of combinations, one does nearly as
well with simple links of the form you indicate with the most
interesting tag combinations for a given blog just named and listed on
the main page or elsewhere on the blog.
Anil Gangolli:
(1) One may want to distinguish between "global" or "public" tags
(folksonomic classfications) which are intended to make sense in a wide
setting, for example, to match what someone else might be searching for
and which may be useful to sites like Technorati, and "local" or
"personal" tags (personal taxonomies) which are really only for
interpretation in a very local context. People make category names of
both varieties. For example, in my little blog, I use the category
"chow" for food/restaurant-related stuff and "System.out" for
miscellany. These can still be tags, but they are not useful ones, and
may even be confusing ones to use in a public setting.
i think this would get way too complicated. i think there should only be a
single tag library/index which applies to everything
Well, this is an area where once you start considering the impact of
publishing tags to aggregators and using them in search engines, it
changes your point of view. One big component of noise in folksonomies
comes just from the fact that people don't consider whether the tag is
going to be used in a public/shared setting or not. [e.g. Flickr photos
tagged "me" (yes, there are plenty). Blog entries tagged "misc" or
"other". Maybe useful in a local context, where one understands the
blogger/poster or the context of other categories, but not in the public
context.]
One way to ease this would be to have all tags be understood to be
public (which is not something to enforce but to educate/clarify), but
allow the ability to assign a local name to a public tag combination.
This becomes essentially a local category or folder.
--a.
