Comments on: Tagging interfaces

By: Sotia Iwar

Sotia Iwar — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 11:44:26 +0000

carnival cruise lines imagination

You’re It! &raqu…

By: Otis

Otis — Wed, 11 May 2005 03:14:17 +0000

tdw: the limitation of the delicious tag implementation is also that you can’t do +things -like +this +with +tags. Check out Simpy.com – you can do all kinds of things with tags. Oh, and you are not limited to just tags (think mini Google).

Nice/looking/URLs are desperately needed, but click through and you’ll see things better in the UI:
http://www.simpy.com/simpy/User.do?username=otis&q=%2Btags:%22search%22
http://www.simpy.com/simpy/User.do?username=otis&q=%2Btags%3A%22search%22+-tags%3A%22api%22

By: tdw

tdw — Wed, 11 May 2005 01:01:12 +0000

The beauty of the delicious tag implementation is that you create your own multiword tags with which to winnow your results, e.g. web+design+usability.

By: getluky.net

getluky.net — Tue, 10 May 2005 21:40:13 +0000

Freetag v0.210 Released! Now with Related Tags ability!

I just released Freetag v0.210 – i’ve released mostly minor improvements / bugfixes so far, but this one also has a new function that is pretty cool.

Myles Grant contributed a similar_tags() function that accepts a tag, and spits back at you other …

By: padams

padams — Tue, 10 May 2005 04:45:08 +0000

We use multiword tags to classify music at Upto11.net. The trade off between single or multi word tags comes when you do the global role up. There will be more items under a tag with single word tags versus fewer hits on multi word ones. The trick seems to be in suggesting truely related tags to the user at tagging time to get the best of both worlds.

By: Otis

Otis — Tue, 10 May 2005 03:35:43 +0000

I always found SingleWordTags to be a side-effect of a technical_limitation/choice. I don’t write_like_this, so why force me to TagThatWay? Commas make sense, pretty much all languages have them, they’ve been around for a loooong time, so commas are what I use for Simpy.com .

As for figuring out that SanFrancisco === sanfrancisco ==> tough. Just like search engines compute relevancy more or less based on keyword frequencies and still can’t actually make sense out of the indexed information, I think we’ll be stuck with the SanFrancisco vs. sanfrancisco problem(?) for a while. Luckily, there are humans to do this work – who needs machines when we have human!

As others have already said, enforcing tags breaks the “first law of folksonomy”, but tagging tools can help users with tag suggestions. For instance, in Simpy I’ve implemented Recommended Tags. These tags are derived from the collective tag set associated with whatever you are tagging. The user does not have to choose any of the recommended tags, but they are there to give the user ideas, to provide an easy way for the user to adopt a common tag spelling/format, and so on. With time, the majority of users will choose a small set of variations on a theme. Hm, I guess that’s that L__g T__l (I will not be caught repeating this phrase!) in action. Once that small set of tags associated with any one given entity is established, the notion of a related tags will help tag consumers discover all significant and relevant tags. Not all tags, but that’s OK. If we wanted all, we wouldn’t be using the folksonomy approach. Enough. Bed time.

By: michelv

michelv — Mon, 09 May 2005 12:03:43 +0000

I just use spaces to separate tags, and quotes to delimiter multiple words.
So the following phrase is actually made of three tags: crash “data loss” osx.
(And I have a tags plugin to release soon, heh.)

By: jbond

jbond — Mon, 09 May 2005 07:47:36 +0000

My current preference is a single textfield, using commas for delimiting, and having lots of single click suggestions below i n the style of the del.icio.us beta posting interface.

On Friday I went live with a tag based craigslist clone[2] within Ecademy[1] using exactly that. We have a lot of relatively unsophisticated users so we’ll see how weel it goes. Initial inidcations are positive.

[1] http://www.ecademy.com
[2] Am I the only person that hates the Craigslist category system and thinks it would be vastly improved with folksonomy/tags?

By: jonl

jonl — Mon, 09 May 2005 04:12:22 +0000

We have Jerome Lavigne’s Keywords plugin.

By: Brian Del Vecchio

Brian Del Vecchio — Mon, 09 May 2005 03:24:33 +0000

PS, I’m sure I’m not the only reader who finds it humorous that this entry appears in the “Uncategorized”, um, Category. Before this credibility gap widens any further, maybe you guys should track down one of the Tagging plugins for Wordpress:
* http://www.tumultco.com/blog/index.php?p=24
* http://www.jluster.org/2005/04/tagging-4-wp-second-stage