Viddler has this neat way of showing you tags and comments in a timeline along the bottom of the video. So if 3 minutes and 21 seconds into the video the video mentions flying spaghetti monster then you can tag that point in time. That tag is text and therefore searchable as well as being linkable. Comments work pretty much the same way. Neat idea.
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.
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