Multi-word tags

[Brett]

On the whole, I agree with John Gruber's "Brief, Bitter Excursus on
the Use of Space as a Tag Delimiter" (http://daringfireball.net/
2006/11/stikkit): I think multi-word tags, separated by commas, would
be a net win over single-world tags.

IIRC, when this was discussed in the original del.icio.us mailing
list, Joshua argued, persuasively, for single-word tags. His decision
probably helped del.icio.us grow, but I think today it limits
delicious's usefulness, especially when you want to search for the
most frequently tagged item on a given topic. People use different
tags or differently formatted "word_clusters," so culling through them
involves a lot of guessing, at least for me, even when I'm just
searching my own tags. I've been using the service almost since it
started, and I can't always remember what tags I decided on years ago.

I'd love to see Pinboard enable comma-separated, multi-word tags along
with user-driven disambiguation. Here's one way it might work:
LibraryThing allows for author, book, and tag combining (http://
www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Help_and_FAQ).

Brett

[maciej]

I don't really have a formed opinion on this topic. My main
attraction to whitespace as a delimiter is that it keeps the URLs
clean (avoiding /t:best%20of%20breed) and makes it easier to present
tag clouds or lists of tags. On the site right now, both commas and
whitespace are interpreted as a delimiter.

I'm going to shelve this decision until more important parts of the
site are done (search and caching), but I'm happy to hear arguments
for and against.

[John Joseph Bachir]

Here is an excellent (and pro-multi-word) discussion of the issue by Thomas Vander Wal, a consultant whose claim to fame is inventing the term "folksonomy".

<http://www.personalinfocloud.com/2009/01/optimizing-tagging-ui-for-people-search.html>

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 2:22 PM, maciej <mcegl...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't really have a formed opinion on this topic.  My main
attraction to whitespace as a delimiter is that it keeps the URLs
clean (avoiding /t:best%20of%20breed) 

How about this: do not allow underscores in tags. In urls, render spaces as underscores. 

 

[maciej]

On Jun 16, 11:03 pm, John Joseph Bachir <johnjosephbac...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Here is an excellent (and pro-multi-word) discussion of the issue by Thomas
> Vander Wal, a consultant whose claim to fame is inventing the term
> "folksonomy".

That fact alone predisposes me against multi-word tags.

[Joshua Schachter]

I think the right thing is let the user choose a default, but assume
if commas appear in the tag field that it is tab delimited.

I also think that for indexing purposes, "foo bar" and FooBar and
foo_bar should all canonicalize to the same thing. Which alleviates
the idiotic argument that some specific thing should be allowed
because people use different things.

[John Joseph Bachir]

Ohh, snap! [as the kids say]

May I ask why? Do you hate the term itself, or the concept, or the premise that the concept exists or is valuable, or...?

[Nishad]

Dude, the guy invented the word "folksonomy" and wasn't even ashamed
to put his name to it. What else is there to say!?

[maciej]

Well, take a look at the guy's special web page devoted to documenting
his great linguistic contribution:

http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html

He devotes a lot of text to the circumstances of his coinage, while
misspelling Joshua's name. I find this symptomatic of the general
process. One set of people does interesting things without a lot of
fanfare, and another builds an elaborate intellectual superstructure
on top without adding value. It's a kind of minor intellectual
parasitism whose main victim appears to be the English language.


On Jul 3, 1:59 am, John Joseph Bachir <johnjosephbac...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[John Joseph Bachir]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:11 AM, maciej <mcegl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, take a look at the guy's special web page devoted to documenting
his great linguistic contribution:

http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html

He devotes a lot of text to the circumstances of his coinage, while
misspelling Joshua's name.   I find this symptomatic of the general
process.   One set of people does interesting things without a lot of
fanfare, and another builds an elaborate intellectual superstructure
on top without adding value.  It's a kind of minor intellectual
parasitism whose main victim appears to be the English language.

I get what you're saying, but [a] I think he made that page mostly because he gets a lot of emails asking him about what the term means and where it originated, and [b] i think the term, while a bit cheesy, is a pretty decently useful way to refer to the concept of a taxonomy developed by a distributed network of users instead of institutionally delegated curators / archivists / catalogers.

do you propose a more appropriate term, or do you feel that the concept itself is not valid? (like, a folksonomy is just a subset of a taxonomy, and nothing special?)

[Joshua Schachter]

Some guy invented a word that ended up being used by a bunch of people. He also made some UI suggestions. You feel this strengthens your argument; they are actually unrelated points.

In reality, the argument presented in the document isn't compelling. Okay, you can now write "San Francisco" instead of "SanFrancisco" or "San_Francisco" but what about "sf" and "san francisco" and so on? There still needs to be normalization. It therefore does not matter.

Joshua

[maciej]

> do you propose a more appropriate term, or do you feel that the concept
> itself is not valid? (like, a folksonomy is just a subset of a taxonomy, and
> nothing special?)

I think this is a case where a large amount of theory is chasing a
small quantity of empirical data. That's really my sole objection - I
would like to find ways to contribute to the latter without
encouraging the former.

On the specific issue of multi word tags, I think the behavior in
pinboard will be to normalize 'foo_bar', 'foo bar' and 'FooBar' to
'foobar' as Joshua suggests, and let people choose their delimiter
(spaces or commas) as they prefer.

[John Joseph Bachir]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 7:06 PM, Joshua Schachter<jos...@schachter.org> wrote:
> Some guy invented a word that ended up being used by a bunch of people. He
> also made some UI suggestions.
> You feel this strengthens your argument; they are actually unrelated points.
> In reality, the argument presented in the document isn't compelling. Okay,

Well it wasn't really my "argument", I was just sending it to the list
for discussion.

If he is someone who has worked on a lot of projects in the space,
then yes, this does strengthen the value of his recommendations....