Anil Gangolli wrote:
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.
okay, i think i see where you are coming from. i guess i still don't
really see that as a "category" the way that categories work now. i can
definitely see the use of having an easy way for a blogger to save
certain tag combinations for use on their blog, but should those be
categories? the same categories that users select when drafting their
weblog entry? i would think that you would get a lot of redundancy if
you did that ... imagine you publish a new entry about java that is
tagged with "java" and "tips" *and* you select the category "Anil's Java
Tips" which by its nature already included the entry based on your
tags. In this situation the category and tags are redundant.
Maybe we can create something like a "saved tag searches", which allows
a blogger to save certain tag combinations and give it a name and then
reuse that list on their blog somewhere. Basically it would be the same
as a bookmark folder, except that all the bookmarks would reference
pages of tag combinations for their 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.]
i think this is just the reality of having lots of users. there is
never going to be a way to prevent people from doing somewhat silly
things like tagging content with "me", but really that's only useless if
that's the only tag applied. if someone tags something as "photo",
"personal", "portrait", "me" then i don't see anything wrong with that
because "me" in this case may be applied publicly, but only meant to be
used privately. so this person could then use a "saved tag search" like
i described above to list entries tagged with "me" and "photo" to create
a personal photo album.
having a single library/index for tags rather than trying to manage
different taxonomies is just a simplicity.
if we wanted to have a simple way of differentiating intended local vs.
public tags for use when being applied to sites like technorati we could
introduce something simple like a special prefix for tags that are not
meant to be propogated publicly. i.e. tags like "+me" or "-me" would
not be included when an entry is rendered and it's tags are displayed
for use by technorati.
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.
right ... this is like the "saved tag search" concept i talked about
above. basically it's a bookmark, but with a slightly special nature.
-- Allen
--a.
