This is orthogonal to Ian’s (very swell) post, but I wanted to insert a plug for Term Merge for anybody who’s struggling with taxonomy cleanup in Drupal. It was really useful to me in tidying up the 43f topics, and I still use it almost every day to try and keep the most popular categories consistent.

Also Drupal-related (but useful in many other contexts), I really like tagging interfaces that autocomplete. This makes it convenient for users to capitalize on existing tags, and really helps ensure that the vocabulary stays useful for everyone.

Great post, Ian. Thanks for this.

First of all, great idea for an article. The only application in which I’ve successfully used tagging is iPhoto, where I’ve tagged each photo with the names of the people that appear in it. When I need to, I can construct a smart folder of all the pictures that include Oscar, for example.

I would really love to hear what kinds of “attributes” people have settled on for tagging URLs in their del.icio.us bookmarks. I have a lot of bookmarks, but the tags that I assign to them are always very ad hoc and decided on the spur of the moment. As a result, I can’t reliably use them to “find” anything later. Does anyone have a more coherent system for doing this? What kinds of tags do you use?

Thanks Ian for bringing up this topic, because many people think that tagging is just a matter of throwing whatever comes to their mind. Which of course brings their tagging system to a big mess.

The biggest frustration for the tagger would be when he 'knows' something is in his database and he can't find it (e.g. he used synonyms or didn't tag the right attributes).

I would like to refer to this issue more deeply and give a real world example - 'arranging your scanned documents using a tagging system'.

First let me introduce myself - my name is Shimon Sofer and I am a co founder of '42Tags' - a software for scanning and tagging documents (Windows only for now).

I would like to show how your ideas are implemented in the field of 'scanned document tagging' using '42Tags', and would like to introduce another idea - 'Major/Minor tags'.

In our application we distinguish between two types of tags. The first type - the 'Major tag' and the second type - the 'Minor tag'.

'Major tags' - should be relatively general and you should have the ability to easily control them,
because there shouldn't be much of them (if you are a home/small office user, 42 will be enough...:) ).

'Minor tags' - are those that are not part of the first group.

I would like to demonstrate the idea:

Let's say that you have a few medical documents which deal with 'a blood test for your daughter Jenny, which
was done to verify if she's got pneumonia. The doctor was John Smith".

In this case I suggest that the 'Major tags' will be "Medical" and "Jenny" and the minor tags will be "blood test", "pneumonia", "John Smith".

The division to attributes you talked about is more relevant to 'Major tags' than 'Minor tags'.

How does a 'Major tag' and a 'Minor tag' practically differ?

In 42Tags we added the ability to add a pushable button for every major tag.

Actually there is only one difference between a 'Major tag' and a 'Minor tag' - 'Major tags' have a shortcut button in a specified tag panel.

Regarding the separation to attributes we offer the 'Tag sections' in which the user should add 'Major tags' of the same attributes.

For example - 'Person section' - Each tag is a name of persons
'Places section' - Each tag is a name of place
'Paper type section' - e.g. Contract, Fax, Invoice, etc...

Anyone can define his own attributes for every section.

If the user would like to reach a 'Minor Tag' - he can just start typing, and auto-completion will help him through it.

Another issue not throughly discussed is the dynamic nature of tags.

After tagging 10-100 items you notice that you need to change your tagging scheme.

For example - you live in Paris and all the papers relevant for your apartment are tagged with
'Paris', and 'Apartment'. After a year you leave to another apartment - in Paris!

You may want to distinguish between the collections.

What we offer is making a search on 'Paris' and 'Apartment', and then using a multiple "Tag/Untag" feature in order for example to add "Rue Barute" to the old material.

Maybe I wrote too much, but I really enjoyed reading your post ;-)

Thanks,
Shimon Sofer
http://www.42tags.com/paperless

microsoft uses the same tagging functionality to convert pictures into 3D models...check out microsofts photosynth

http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

I’ve been thinking my fair bit about tagging, and have come to the conclusion that there are two fundamentally different tagging strategies, depending on whether your goal is to categorize your information, or to make it easy to retrieve a particular item. I’ll use the example of bookmarks here, but the same essentially applies to any collection of information.

The “categorize” strategy is essentially the one proposed by Ian. The goal of this strategy is to be able to quickly retrieve all bookmarks belonging to a particular category. It consists of two steps. In the first step, you make a list of tags that you will use, corresponding to your categories. In the second step, you use tags from this list to tag your bookmarks as you add them to your collection. From time to time you might decide to add another tag to your list, if you’ve found that tag to be useful.

For example, your tags might be microsoft, windows, linux, gentoo, debian, kernel, cplusplus. If you’d want to see all bookmarks about kernels, whether they be about the Linux kernel or the Windows XP kernel, you’d use the kernel tag to find these. Or you might use the combination of kernel and linux to find only bookmarks about the Linux kernel.

The second, alternative strategy I call the “retrieval” strategy. Its goal is to quickly be able to retrieve one particular bookmark. The idea is that if you remember approximately the content of one particular website, you quickly find the right bookmark. For example, you would use the tags gentoo, kernel, compilation, and udev to tag a page about compiling the kernel with Udev support in Gentoo Linux.

The fundamental difference between the two strategies now emerges. If you were using the “categorize” strategy, you would be likely to also tag the Gentoo kernel page with linux, since it clearly falls into that category, but you would not use udev, since you will be very likely to never have another bookmark about Udev, and you want to avoid categories containing single items. On the other hand, if you are using the “retrieval” strategy and you want to find that particular page you remember about compiling Udev into the gentoo kernel, then the tag gentoo makes the tag linux obsolete. Indeed, since Gentoo implies Linux (unless your collection contains bookmarks about a that particular kind of penguin), the bookmarks tagged gentoo are a subset of those tagged linux, and adding the tag linux to your search does not alter your results. The udev tag, though, will be very helpful since it will narrow down your results to the wanted bookmark.

To summarize, the “categorize” strategy asks for relatively broad tag categories (such as linux or windows, but not compiling or udev), otherwise your tag list would quickly be a cluttered mess. On the other hand, for the “retrieval” strategy the tags should be as specific as possible. This will clutter up my tag list, you say? Never mind, if you don’t use the tags to browse through your bookmarks.

I am curious if there is a way to reconcile the two strategies, to get the “best of both worlds”.

(As an aside, note that the “categorize” strategy is not much different to conventional bookmark handling in a web browser: First you create your bookmark folder hierarchy, then you add bookmarks to these folders as you surf the web. The difference is that with folders you can only make sets and subsets, but you cannot have intersections of sets, since if a bookmark belongs to a particular folder, it cannot also belong to a folder which is not a subset or a superset of the first folder. Another difference between between the two approaches is that there is no tagging system I know of that allows you to define subset-relationships between tasks. For example, you would define gentoo as a sub-tag of linux, so that anything you tag with gentoo would also be tagged with linux. Similarly, you would define linux as a sub-tag of the operating systems tag, and so on.)

Hi, I’ve just joined so maybe I’m commenting in the wrong section or this has been suggested elsewhere before.

I don’t know how it works for every site but for those with tagging systems similar to delicious, I think the idea of Inbox Zero works well for tagging too.

I say this because one of the things I hate about tagging (I’m a folders type of guy) is how I have to really think about every detail of an item prior to tagging and still, I might miss a tag or so or add an extra tag that I’ll find I don’t actually need when doing the actual search.

First would be to have an inbox. For those who imported bookmarks in delicious, the import tags works well in my opinion.

The idea is to go wild on tagging or what aleene from Microcontent Musings calls informal tagging and add an “inbox” tag at the end of those tags. In this example, I would add an import tag for every bookmark I submit to delicious even the ones that I didn’t import. As an added bonus, all the bookmarks that got imported into delicious and had received informal tags due to delicious’ autotagging or just from a previous mistake are also tagged with the import tag assuming the person didn’t remove it.

Then if a user wants the advantage and flexibility of informal tagging, they could just go to the import tag and work on the related tags there. Still the goal would be to not have anything under import as much as possible without having to worry about every little item that’s going to be tagged.

The next step would be to just follow the above guide through and through and then add another consistent tag say satisfactory and replace the inbox tag with it. Then, when the user needs formal tagging, he gets to have that option to. The downside being that the items aren’t probably going to be organized formally as soon as they’re added but I find I’m much more focused in adding tags when I’m in organize item mode rather than add tags to new item mode.