Peter Van Dijck posted a chat transcript with some interesting ideas about the future of tags.
I'll preface my comments by saying that I really haven't been following the world of tags that closely. Sure, I've used tags, and even built a system that featured tags, but I haven't dived into the conversation about the future of tags. So, I guess everything I say here might well have been said before. Oh well.
Anyway, Peter and Emanuele talked about a couple of interesting concepts: facets, heirarchies, and tag UI.
The information manager in me *loves* the idea of combining facets with tags. Del.icio.us has an embryonic version of this with their "for:username" tag (letting you "send" a bookmark to someone else). You can see how it might be useful to tag something with "place:seattle" or "color:red" or "size:venti".
Hierarchies also make lots of sense. It would let people create tag taxonomies, rather than the flat universes that are created with most tag systems right now. Peter and Emanuele mention the hacks that people use on del.icio.us right now.
Then there is the UI problem: how do people enter these tags? What syntax is used? As the saying goes, "be liberal in what you accept..." In other words, you can easily come up with multiple ways to specify these relationships using plain text (we'll ignore any sort of GUI interface for now). Tag systems should accept and deal with multiple syntaxes:
place:seattle
place=seattle
United States > Washington > Seattle
United States/Washington/Seattle
place:United States > Washington > Seattle
and so on.
Anyway, fun stuff.
Posted by Karl
February 16, 2006 12:16 PM