Losing Sleep » Tags http://crios.info Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:53:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Del.icio.us Tagging Post http://crios.info/2007/12/18/delicious-tagging-post/ http://crios.info/2007/12/18/delicious-tagging-post/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:48:40 +0000 Chris http://crios.info/2007/12/18/delicious-tagging-post/ delicious.jpgI like Del.icio.us. I probably don’t use it the way it’s supposed to be used. I tend to use it like a web scrapbook. I put things there that I want to remember for later or things that I don’t have time to read but plan to get back to. It works pretty well for me and I tend to keep it pretty tidy, getting rid of stuff a month or two after I saved it. I’ll probably get rid of all the LIS768 tagged stuff once my class is completely over. There are a couple of things that I think Del.icio.us needs to do to improve their over all service.

  • Build in some kind of bibliographic control for tags. I’ve posted about this once before, there needs to be some kind of standard for tagging. Something like, no plurals, correcting spelling, etc…
  • They need to build in support for multi-word tags. It drives me crazy that everything has to be a single mass rather than two or more terms (i.e. “web 2.0″, “graphic novel”, “science fiction”, etc…). Other web 2.0 apps can do it, how come Del.icio.us can’t?
  • Design. I like the simple basic design of Del.icio.us but they need to do just a little bit more… Nothing fancy, but how about alternating shades of gray for each link so that it’s easier to differentiate between different links.

All in all Del.icio.us is a pretty useful tool. Supposedly there is going to be a redesign next year, but we’ll see about that…

]]> http://crios.info/2007/12/18/delicious-tagging-post/feed/ 0 Web 2.0 and Bibliographic Control… http://crios.info/2007/09/17/web-20-and-bibliographic-control/ http://crios.info/2007/09/17/web-20-and-bibliographic-control/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:42:34 +0000 Chris http://crios.info/2007/09/17/web-20-and-bibliographic-control/ del.icio.us tagsTags are great, I really like them. I’ve used tags myself and they tend to be really useful, but I’ve also found them confusing and unnecessarily complex. For example, if you glance to the image on your left you’ll see the tag cloud for my del.icio.us bookmarks. Look at the unbundled tags. If you look at the l’s you’ll see Librarians, libraries and library. Also in the b’s is blog, blogging and Blogs. There should be a standard for tagging that should be endorsed by web 2.0/library 2.0 entities otherwise what we will end up seeing is repetitive and inefficient. When tagging you shouldn’t have to ask yourself: Should I use singular or plural? Should I capitalize or not? Should I use the verb or noun form? For lack of a better term I would say that tags need some form of bibliographic control. I’m not a coder so I don’t know how difficult it would be to write in some kind of bibliographic control but it doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult. Perhaps tags could be compared against a dictionary and singular forms could be used over plural forms and nouns could be used over verbs (when applicable). Wikipedia seems to practice a form of this. If you go to Wikipedia and search for blogging you will be directed to the page for blog. If you search for libraries you’ll be directed to library (but if you search for librarian you will find an entry for librarian). I’m all for the wisdom of the crowds but I also think there needs to be some kind of management or you may end up with chaos.

What I basically would like to see is an implementation of a form of subject headings. Tags are definitely different from subject headings in that they are broader and encompass multiple facets of a work but the basic idea isn’t all that different. I think that web 2.0 could really benefit from some tag management.

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