Life is grand

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.

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.

Just a quick one to say that tagging systems need to accept as varied a set of characters as they can. BlinkList for instance doesn’t allow “C#” as a tag as the # is not allowed. This makes tagging any C# links difficult as I have to use “csharp” instead. Same goes for Yahoo! which becomes Yahoo.

About the only character I can think of that should be withheld is the comma to make multiple tags easy to enter. I have never run across needing to add in a tag with a comma.

Tagging systems need to be flexible for other languages too. Can yours handle Chinese characters?

Is a forced directed graph a good way of navigating a tag collection? You could click on tags and see related tags span out from them. Closely related tags would be clumped closer together with stronger lines connecting them. Much like words are displayed in Visual Wordnet.