On 4/1/06, Matthew Weymar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This is kind of an interesting subject actually. > > There are all kinds of potential conventions for multi-word tagging. As a > result, if you're going to go looking for things other people have tagged > "aerospace engineering," in one form or another, AFAIK, you still have to > pull up "aerospace+engineering," and, separately, "AerospaceEngineering," > and, separately, "Aerospace_Engineering," and, separately, " > Aerospace.Engineering," etc., etc.... (Names are another obvious example of > this - say, if you want to pull up all things tagged HarrietMiers, or > Samuel_Alito.... Cf. San_Francisco and LosAngeles, too...) > > If I'm not mistaken, Flickr handles this automagically - delivering > "everything" when you search on "aerospace engineering," e.g. (Btw, lots of > great aerospace engineering photos on Flickr, I'm sure!) > > It will be interesting to see how del. handles this. > > Singulars and plurals are another example here. Is it still the case that > things tagged "zxoicu" will not show under > http://del.icio.us/tag/zxoicus?... > This is part of a broader issue re who the "target market," or "userbase," > or whatever is of del., and how best to serve them. Obviously, Flickr's > goin' way mainstream, and thinks back-end magic is the best way to serve > them: Take away some control in the name of convenience. > > I'll be surprised if del. doesn't move down the same, or at least a very > similar path. In fact, I'm surprised this hasn't happened already....
Yes it is an interesting are, and as del.icio.us is much about simplicity and the users choice I guess Joshua is reluctant to introduce any "cataloguing rules". But such rules exists in old systems for a reason ... While del.icio.us leans on the huge user base the need for addressing the problem is not emidiate - in most cases the resource you need will be tagged with all the suggested methods by different people. But new and niche resources won't. But is back-end magic really a good solution? It would lessen user choice as well. Right now I can't come up with an English example on how concatenating tags would mess up things, but in my native language Swedish compound words are very common, and might have very different meaning than the separate words. A source for many hard to translate jokes: "Brunhårig sjuksköterska" = "Brown-haired nurse" but "Brun hårig sjuk sköterska" = "Brown hairy sick nurse" As long as del.icio.us hasn't addressed multi-linguality any such back-end magic might mess up things really bad. Plural forms differ between languages too. And I don't want my english plural/singular tags mixed up either: I use "blog" for a resource that _is_ a blog, but "blogs" for blogs as a _topic_. (Sure, in that case I could use "blogging", but what about _a library_ versus _the topic libraries_?) But on the other hand, if the back-end magic would be user controllable it would be a useful tool. /Daniel One aspect of del.icio.us back-end magic is _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
