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14 Sep 2007
Tagging advice
Ian Beck gives some advice no tagging. Basically he says that you first have to identify the Items (MicroContent and Files) you are tagging and then about the tags themselves. And the crux seems to be to chose a consistent method.
The way he talks about tagging reminds me of a more formal way of tagging, whereas I would prefer a more informal way. The formal way (and then I am not talking about ontologies) is for me already the method one uses to gather Items is folders. And these can be file system folders or more flexible ones in MicroContent Clients. And this formal way also refers to the colour labels of MacOSX. The formal way of tagging implies a strict use of terminology, where changes are difficult to make afterwards.
The informal way is more flexible and basically you can do as you like. One can introduce errors in this method as well, but those seem to be easier to repair. This informal approach however requires the user to traverse the tag cloud in an easy way, so that ill tagged items can still be found. And traversing should include the relation between tags, so that synonyms, etc can be found. The application that does this well is WebnoteHappy.