Archive for the ‘lixb’ Category

Delicious full text search

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

A friend has a really good idea. Allow users to do a full-text search across the sites they have bookmarked. Wether that be your Firefox/IE bookmarks or your del.icio.us/Blinklist links. With systems such as Rollyo this would not be hard to do.

Rollyo is a good idea but I never use it as the link between the sites I visit and value and the sites in my custom Rollyo search engine is not automatically updated. If Rollyo would monitor my Blinklist links adding sites as I blink them I’d have good reason to use Rollyo. Integration into Firefox(through the search textbox top right) or Blinklist would be ideal.

(Rollyo does have a “bookmark importer” tool but it isn’t automatic and only works with your Firefox bookmarks, not del.icio.us and co.)

Posted in BlinkList, Delicious, Idea, Links, Shog9, full text, lixb, rollyo, search | Comments

Key/value tags

Friday, August 18th, 2006

In a previous post I mentioned ActionTags. Along those lines I’d like to see tagging systems support “key/value pairs.” This is a familiar concept to any programmer. Basically you have a table in your database that can store an ad-hoc set of data. Anything that doesn’t fit into your other tables or is not worth creating a distinct model for. e.g. application settings. You identify the value with a key and that can be easily retrieved.

JSON is a key/value pair system really (except that values can be structures themselves.)

When it comes to tagging key/value pairs would work well and provide some distinct meaning to tags. You could have fruit:orange with the key being fruit and the value being orange in that case. colour:orange is then distinct from fruit:orange.

I was thinking of this because I am doing some “open CMS” research at work and wanted to save my Blinklist links into a collection related to the research. At first I thought of providing a unique tag for this, e.g. researchproj001 or something convoluted like that. It struck me though that simply doing collection:Project Name works well. Blinklist and I assume other systems allow the colon and so support this already. But they need a bit more work to make it completely usable. I don’t want to loose the tag inside the value of the key/value pair. e.g. if I tagged a link as collection:Bubble Project I wouldn’t be able to show a list of links with that tag “Bubble Project.” I’d have to use the whole k/v of collection:Bubble Project as Blinklist treats it as one tag.

So, some sort of key/value pair support in tagging systems, please.

Posted in ActionTags, Value, action tags, key, key/value pairs, lixb, pair, tagging | Comments

Action tags

Friday, August 4th, 2006

Tags have, without a doubt, made my life better. My photos are better organised, my links are readily accesible, my posts categorised and I am labelling my emails like there is no tomorrow. I’m waiting for file systems to get in on the act and then life is complete. At least eLife is.

I want to see tags go a bit further though. I want their simplicty retained but their power expanded.

Many a time have I uploaded a photo to Flickr and wanted to have that photo automatically emailed to a group of friends based on a tag. Everyday I link URLs on del.icio.us and Blinklist that I want automatically sent to a group of fellow linkers. For example if I link “http://www.evoca.com” I would tag it with some standard metadata tags (e.g. “podcasting, audio, phonecasting, website, service”.) The next tag I would want to add is “group:podcasters”. The system would see the “group” ActionTag and send some kind of notification to the podcasters group.

Another ActionTag might be “email:bill@gates.com” which does exactly what it says on the tin (with some measures to prevent email abuse of course.) Maybe you want pingomatic pinged when you add a photo in which case “ping:pingomatic.com” is added as a tag. How about tying in text services “sms:+353868968944″ or API calls “api:basecamphq.com/api/tasks/add?t=evoca.com”. The last one is a bit complicated but having the capability would be very interesting.

I don’t want to complicate tags so in no way should an ActionTag aware system put any conditions on other tags. Listing tags for an item should either exclude or differentiate ActionTags in some way. ActionTags need to be simple to enter as well, maybe a colon to separate the key from the value (though that impacts a value of an URL.)

Mainly I want to automate my photos, links, emails and so on with simple commands.

Posted in ActionTags, BlinkList, Delicious, Development, Links, action tags, lixb, metadata, microactions, tagging, tags | Comments