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.
