del.icio.us descriptors
When I bookmark my blog posts in del.icio.us I sometimes use a lot of tags, but only 1 or 2 really grasp the aboutness of the post…I use several others as there may be chunks in the post that also refers to closely related stuff.
In library land I remember this issue being overcome by being able to search via two types of subject fields: Major Descriptor - overall aboutness of the item
Minor Descriptor - the item also covers this stuff, but isn’t totally about it
…this would be a great implementation in del.icio.us as you could have 2 versions of the same tag.
Maybe I can get around this by prefixing my tags
Eg. the tag “Technorati”
MD:Technorati - when the bookmark is actually about Technorati
md:Technorati - when the bookmark mentions a bit about Technorati, but the overall aboutness of the item is about something else
…and if the bookmark has only a passing comment about Technorati, maybe we’ll just leave that to the full-text engine to find.
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“…this would be a great implementation in del.icio.us as you could have 2 versions of the same tag.”
That is, if you’re talking about subject fields. But when they are going to make this distinction, what should they do with other kinds of descriptors? What if I tag my entries according to the type of action I intend to take upon it? Or to the type of document, e.g. ‘blogposts’ or ‘newsitems’?
Comment by Twan van Elk — September 14, 2005 @ 12:42 pm
Your totally right, I’m assuming tags are subject terms, but they can be any kind of label eg. action, document type. etc..
So you would have to have a list of prefixes that define what type of tag the tag is…if I had a space at the top of my del.icio.us account I could list a legend for my tag prefixes, so people browsing know the context of my tags…and I could tag bundle by prefix
Comment by Johnt — September 15, 2005 @ 1:38 am
I don’t think that it is possible to solve the problem of aboutness the way you describe, because people tag in different ways. The solution you mention may be great for the way you personally tag your entries, but for others it wouldn’t work. If someone already tries to just add tags that describe the overall aboutness of the entry for instance… the way they look at it at that moment in time! I think you have to consider the fact, that when you search for tagged entries, the context of your search may be completely different from the context in which you were tagging.
Comment by Twan van Elk — September 16, 2005 @ 12:01 pm