hebig.org/blog
Personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

This is an entry I have written in early November but just saved as a draft then. Now that the self-fullfilling prophecy caravan is making station in Paris it might be a good moment to publish it.

[...] Building visualization tools, building keyword handling, editing and grouping tools, building more nifty interfaces might be further steps. So are gluing together thematically related blog entries, wiki pages and bookmark collections (finally a solution to that!) or applying the tags architecture to entirely different applications like a photo collection (hint hint) or this weblog (there is already a hack that replaces Movable Type's category system with del.icio.us tags). Generally, tagging discipline will be an important subject as it is a cornerstone for building powerful queries.

That's what I've written one year ago on tagging. See how the issues haven't changed since? It is amazing how little effort went into basic things like tag handling, editing and grouping so far - while at the same time, lots of effort went into creating a new mini Web 2.0 VC-bubble? (See Joel Spolsky's Architecture Astronauts Are Back for the latter point.)

Example: synonyms or tag groups. There are lots of photos of the local blast furnaces plant called Phoenix West (you know that I am into taking photos of such plants, so let's use an example from that domain). Tagging photos of these plants, people will probably use Phoenix_West, Phönix_West, Phoenixwest, Phönixwest and phw. ö and oe are roughly equal in German which makes this example a bit more interesting. Five tags, all synonymous.

So let's come up with an interface that lets me say "All these five tags are synonyms. Let's use phw as the default term for this group. If someone uses one the five tags, ask him if he really means this Phoenix West [ambiguity issue], and if so, automagically replace the used tag with phw." And then let's have similar mechanism for search and for batch changing older entries accordingly. Once we have such basic functions, lets build more fancy things like tag attributes and tags that come with custom rendering rules - wide open fields :-)

RELATED
2004-10-30 Switching to del.icio.us