The Need For A Tagging Standard 200
John Carmichael writes "Tags are everywhere now. Not just blogs, but famous news sites, corporate press bulletins, forums, and even Slashdot. That's why it's such a shame that they're rendered almost entirely useless by the lack of a tagging standard with which tags from various sites and tag aggregators like Technorati and Del.icio.us can compare and relate tags to one another.
Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the blogosphere — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they're not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it.
I have to say, it would be nice to just learn one way of tagging content and using it everywhere.""
Don't agree (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't thing the problem is a standard for tagging, the problem is having a standard for sharing tags between applications. But that's another problem and it doesn't need to be solved to implement tagging itself.
Automatic tagging (Score:5, Insightful)
Herein lies the rub: You're never going to get everyone to agree on a set of appropriate tags. Even if you do, you'll never have them uniformly applied (well I find that humorous but you have it tagged as inappropriate).
There are other solutions here, such as automatic semantic generation. Hey, I never said it was an easy solution, but it's one that I'm certain can be accomplished. Flame away
One Key Point (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't they have this problem in Babel? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure, but haven't we already figured out that tagging would require more tags than the actual information being tagged to accomplish what the original poster was asking for?
People actually pay that much attention to tags? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopeless (Score:5, Insightful)
But to standardize the format of tags and to standardize how to exchange tags between systems, is a great idea.
I'm fired, aren't I? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only thing worse would be something like, I dunno, "tags should be a Web 2.0 standard" or somesuch.
Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?
A standard for tagging (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A standard for tagging (Score:2, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:1, Insightful)
Tags are for things that AREN'T standardized (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Automatic tagging (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that someone thinks something is funny and someone else thinks it is inappropriate is useful information to gather, if you get 5000 funny and 5 inappropriate, you have a lot more information than if you have nothing at all, but even in you get 10 and 10 you still have more information, which is probably a good thing.
Re:Don't agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One Key Point (Score:4, Insightful)
For technology, as an example, how do you quote things? How do you separate tokens? Do you use StudlyCaps and spaces? "Quoted words", and commas? If the later, what about nested quotes?
Bullshit question. The question is solved. Use XML. (Yeah, well, it is the web). We don't need Yet Another CSV "standard". Tags may be presented as lists, in spans, or WTF ever. But if you are talking about storage and transmission, then store the tokens separately, and transmit them in an unambiguous format; in 2007, on the web, the solutions are implementation-specific and XML, respectively.
For linguistics, thats harder. Nouns or verbs? Talk to a librarian, Im sure there are volumes of information on the right way. But I don't care, as I'm still disgusted that the technology problem even exists.
Right now it seems there is little discussion on the problem. Right now, if implementations are trying to reinvent data encoding schemes either the implementations are totally brain dead (and need a kick in the ass from an outside force), or are completely oblivious to the problems they are encoding into there core features (and thus still need a kick in the ass). This is so bad, its worse then wrong. You have to try to get to the point of being wrong.
Of course, I don't care because tags are stupid. OTOH, perhaps I would care if they at least were implemented in a potentially useful way.
Re:XML? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh yes, Brain. (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't forget to make it structured, with methods and types and blah blah blah.
It's just words, fer chrissakes. When you can tell me the difference between "its" and "it's" then you can talk about standards for words. Until then, PLEASE let's not have another standards war over something trivial that is supposed to save the world but will only serve to confuse everyone, all over again.
Better hurry... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at gmail, frinstance. Labels replace folders, and a mail can have more than one label. More importantly, they're predefined, and the interface doesn;t really allow you to be prolific with your tagging.
Compare this with the crappy way del.icio.us allows you to put a billion tags for each link, and I can see why its such a mess.
I agree with others here that something like tagging oughtn't to be standardised or they'll lose their whole purpose, but really, there are other reasonable solutions that atleast help in atleast reducing the amount of craptagging going on. I've experimented with Blinklist and del.icio.us, and my bookmarks in the former are far better tagged because I can actually see my existing tags while bookmarking a new site.
Re:Automatic tagging (Score:2, Insightful)
*shrugs*
They're not that useful anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Insightful)
The only issue is what to do when there are multiple sub-documents on a single page, like if Slashdot allowed individual replies to be tagged.
Re:Don't agree (Score:5, Insightful)
The medium, as Marshall Maclluhan said, is the message. As soon as you standardize the format of the tags you will restrict the kind of information people can convey with them. That may be an acceptable limitation to you, but not to others, and they will find workarounds that effectively break the standard.
For example, if tags were standardized on underscores to separate words you would have to forbid spaces and caps to enforce that standard. And then we would have no way of distinguishing between Polish and polish, which would be bad if you were looking for things to do with Eastern European culture or furniture care products. People would then start doing things like expressing capitalization by some other syntactical hack which would be inconsistently applied and a greater mess would ensue.
Alternatively, tags could be represented as more complex markup:
<tag>
<word order="1">really</word>
<word order="2">stupid</word>
</tag>
But because words and concepts have no general one-to-one correspondence (many words do not convey a unique concept or a concept at all, and many concepts cannot be conveyed in one word) this would be inadequate, and in any case even if the content model of the "word" tag forbade spaces, caps and underscores, people would still create tags that looked like:
<tag><word>reallystupid</word></tag>
The basic idea of "semantic markup" is wrong. From the summary:
the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they're not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it. I have to say, it would be nice to just learn one way of tagging content and using it everywhere.
Actually, tags as they stand are the very embodiment of the semantic web. The only function of the semantic web is to create confusion and discord, because confusion and discord is the essence of the human epistemological condition. And the call for "one way of doing X" has a nice religious ring to it, history shows that attempts to standardize things relating to human thought are very much misguided.
Re:Hyphens. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the time, the tags have little to do with the actual article (eg. yes, no, maybe, fud, notfud, flamebait). I thought the purpose of tags was to be able to find an article easily later on when it has been archived, and the usefulness of the tags I just mentioned for this purpose is dubious at best. I do not pretend to have a solution to this problem, but I think the situation would be improved if the editors or maybe the
Re:One Key Point (Score:3, Insightful)
Tags are keywords. More specifically, they are subject keywords.
If you can wrap your head around this idea, then you might realize what the author is talking about is a list of 'standardized' subject headings. You may know this by its common street name: a thesaurus [wikipedia.org] (although some people prefer to use the terms ontology, taxonomy, or controlled vocabulary).
There are plenty of well-established, long-standing, open thesauri out there - a few examples:
MeSH [wikipedia.org]
LCSH (Library of Congress) [wikipedia.org]
CSH (National Library of Canada) [wikipedia.org]
There are even ANSI and ISO guideline standards for how to develop monolingual and multilingual thesauri for specific subject areas. This practice has existed well before the advent of the Internet, since before the first libraries even. Over the past hundred years or so, the practice has become highly refined in order to facilitate the practice of indexing.
That's right, when you "tag" a page, you're actually indexing it. But you can call it "tagging" if that makes you feel cooler.
Re:The other option (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not so fast... (Score:2, Insightful)
the standard is the rel-tag microformat (Score:2, Insightful)
The better, more relevant standard for tagging is the rel-tag microformat, http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag [microformats.org]
You put a rel="tag" attribute on a hyperlink to the page on Del.icio.us or whatever that defines the tag. The microformats.org page succinctly explains the benefits of this approach.
It even explains how to encode spaces and special characters. So there's NO issue with the envelope or format, except that Del.icio.us (or is it Technorati?) doesn't like spaces in tag names.
As for the *content* of tags, yeah they're unavoidably a disorganized mess. Eggheads who know about ontology and RDF say they can't work. But they do, sort-of.
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