Mmm…tags
You know, the web is a huge place. I mean, ha…uge. The down side to this hugeness, is finding what you need, when you need it. Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking to myself about the concept of tagging and what it does to help the user. Now granted, tagging is nothing new and anyone who blogs, knows of Technorati, Flickr and the like, knows what tagging is. My point is this; tagging seems to be growing and at an exponential rate. I read many feeds everyday and a few have been growing in the sense of how you get to the information at hand. Thomas, has been doing this for as long as I’ve known him, but others, such as Dan, James, Brian and Rob have taken on this tagging technique as well (Jared seemed to be heading in this direction for a while). Maybe they have been doing it for a while and I have just now noticed, but the concept works well with finding data and similar concepts tied to the same data.
The popular CMS, WordPress, allows for the categorization of the content on ones site. It does this through “Categories,” which seemed like an odd term for the information at hand. When I first saw this word, I thought to keep things simple and that the less categories, the better. Now I’m seeing differently, that these categories serve well as tagging and at large expanse, need a better place than in the sidebar of WordPress. The list can become rather long and almost unmanageable. Finding data in the lists and sub-lists can be somewhat tiresome and mind numbing at best.
I really like the idea of tagging in a CMS as opposed to categorization. I think along with my redesign will come the expansion of my categories into a tagging system along with a way to manage those tags. Does anyone have any plug-ins or ideas to make the integration of tagging easier? If so, I’d like to hear them.
October 12th, 2005 at 4:21 pm
Yes my friend, I certainly DO. I’ve been a tagging freak as you’ve probably seen recently. I got the plug-in, Cat 2 Tag (v 0.9) - it lets me create new categories on the fly instead of having to do it beforehand, or save a draft and do it midway through. It’s sort of a flickr like interface, showing you your most popular tags first and then expanding to show them all. I have noticed a shortcoming with multiple word tags since the delimiter is a space, sometimes I type them in with a -dash- and then edit the category later on. I think others have modded the plug-in for such things though.
Hope all is well with you! I’m playing manager this week, so my brain’s gone all fuzzy.
October 12th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for the information. I’ve looked into Cat 2 Tag, but never gave it a shot on my development server at home. I will definitely give that a shot.
All is well. I just returned from a long weekend in Chicago this past weekend. More on that in a post tomorrow. There will be photos-a-plenty as well. I saw on your blog you were playing manager. Have fun with that. Speaking of FHWA, INDUS called me the other day about the open position with you guys. WEIRD!!
October 13th, 2005 at 7:45 am
HA! You *know* you wanna come back…
(yeah, right)
October 13th, 2005 at 8:42 am
Actually, the thought had crossed my mind, but after careful consideration, I figured it would be best not to try, although, it was very tempting. Being back with people whose work habits I know and those I can or can’t count on for certain things is a plus. Also, FHWA is one of the few places in DC on the government side that’s doing things the right way and if not 100% the right way on some projects, it’s only off by a few percent. You all should consider yourself lucky in many respects. The stories I could tell from my past year of experiences are mind blowing.
October 14th, 2005 at 11:06 am
Hey Jason:
I’ve settled on using my WordPress categories for “big picture” organization, and leave tags for on-the-fly ideas that might not be worthwhile creating a complete category for.
I’ve just dropped the “Technorati Tags Bookmarklet” javascript (I think originally created by Matt from Oddio) into my browser toolbar folder (as a bookmark) for easy access.
Here’s the script:
javascript:(function(){var a='';var t=prompt('Enter Tags:','');var tr=t.split(' ');a+='Technorati Tags: ';for(var i=0;i 0){a+=', ';}a+=''+tr[i]+”;}a+=”;prompt(’Copy this code, press OK, then paste to your blog entry:’,a);})()October 14th, 2005 at 11:24 am
Actually, I Furled it - despite the creator’s site being down, you should be able to bookmark the cached link from here.
October 14th, 2005 at 11:26 am
Cool!! Thanks for pointing that out Rob!!
October 19th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Hmmm. For a blog you would most likely want categories and not tags. The difference is a more controlled and more narrow collection of words. They are used to aggregate information on your site together.
Technorati uses these in an odd manner, in that they aggregate them outside the sites they pull them from. The Technorati approach mixes many focusses for tags and categories in one interface and weights them all the same, which has some problems. The focus of the tagging is a problem as the anybody who hits the Technorati page does not know if the tag relates to an outside link being pointed to in a post, the posting itself, an explicit idea in the post, and/or a general idea being expressed in the post.
Additionally the idea of tagging for others has a term, which is not folksonomy but metacrap.
I have well over 150 categories or keywords I use for my site. They do not make a lot of sense outside my site, but are useful to find other similar information within my site itself. I am always wanting to add more, which I may in the not too distant future as I have modified my focus and interests and the categories need to keep up. I also apply more than one category to a post as the goal is to more easily aggregate similar items than it is to apply just one category and have one distinct meaning for each entry.
October 25th, 2005 at 11:11 am
I actually had to Google “Metacrap” and I came up with some interesting information on the subject. I won’t elaborate on that here, but I like your thoughts Thomas and you make very valid points.
It has always been confusing from my perspective - being young in the field - of IA and the like and trying to keep up with the thinkers and the followers. What’s right; what’s wrong? How do users truly use the data on a site and how to better “get at” the information which we so desire? From user testing and building sites in the last few years, I can see how users currently get to data, but the real question is, “How can we make it better?” What is the next metaphor for data mining and getting to the data we want? I know you speak of the “come to me web” but really achieving that is the next big hurdle. Pointing and clicking is getting tedious and old, especially with all that is out there to grab in cyberspace. I want more ease of use and a better way to get to what I want, when I want it.