total.pardo

issue - too many tags, too much metadata: with all the social bookmarking sites, google reader, my own blog, flickr, where ever - there is an ever present need to “tag” items. perhaps first its best to define a tag, category, and, maybe even, a folder.

we all know the concept of a folder - a place to hold papers that refer to the same subject as labeled. in the computer world, one can create files and place them in folders. the reality is, when you make a folder, you really are “tagging” a file - metaphorically placing the electronic file inside an electronic folder that is tagged as a subject.

wikipedia defines a “tag” as:

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.

folksonomy, or collaborative tagging, allows for social convention to massage the metadata to annotate and categorize content through tagging. with uncontrolled vocabulary, plurality issues, spaces or lack thereof - incongruities that make consistent search troublesome. The wikipedia article on folksonomy refers to something called “desire lines” (Peter Merholz, 2004) as foot-worn paths that emerge over time in the data that ensure increased utility of metadata search.

categories only blur the metaphor - they predicate or delineate attributes to a grouping of things. in the meta data world - on web logs, in bookmarking services, or for music tagging, a category could be a group of music assigned to a genre or a group of similar bookmarks. categories are not tags. tags can be categories. categories don’t aid search engines in finding information. tags can help you index your pages or bookmarks more efficiently.

all of this is meta data - data about the data itself and is a useful oxymoron, conundrum even. it allows better understanding of the nature of the data so it may be managed or indexed more readily.

pardo took the “desire lines” idea and applied it to his own “tags” (and, in some places, categories, as on this web blog). the need to optimize the site for my own search purposes is paramount - especially as time goes by and the sheer volume of posts and information become unmanageable. extend the use of converged or unified tags to other aspects of the life stream data produced by the fire hose of information every daily. add to this the ever increasing number of useful applications that do many of the same things - gmarks vs. del.icio.us - without consistency, it will become impossible to locate what you need quickly.

i made the tags consistent across all applications - calling the below list “converged tags” - converged across apps and joined as categories and tags. since a tag can be a category, all data points filed under a category have the same tag name. each post will have additional tags to further describe the nature of the data. to wit:

amateur.radio (anything about ham radio)

funny.laugh (items that are funny in nature)

gaming (anything about gaming)

ideas (ambiguous - this is a tag for items that will be ideas for me)

life.stream (very ambiguous - this could be a tag for everything i know, am, have, write about, see, discuss, etc. see http://www.totalpardo.net/aboutpardo for more on life stream)

link.blog (somewhat ambiguous - links to other data points of interest to me or sites to visit later. i use del.icio.us as a quasi - ling blog to share this data set publicly)

listen (more ambiguity - anything which can be heard - music, podcasts)

outside (anything about the outside - hiking, geocaching, sports)

reference (very ambiguous - sites, items i need to maintain to refer to in the future)

tech (clear - all technical related items - could and should be sub-tagged for greater indexing)

visual (anything that can be seen, art, tv, movies)

word.log (specific use, but with added ambiguity - first was for words i wanted to keep a record of which i did not know the definitions; later for reading discussion items)

writing (specific -items about writing)

i will convert the categories on this site to tags but retain the categories for organizational continuity. the value in tagging will be the sub-tags - this meta data will aid in the search later. those master tags will keep things organized across the application continuum.