Slashdot Mirror
The Need For A Tagging Standard
John Carmichael writes "Tags are everywhere now. Not just blogs, but famous news sites, corporate press bulletins, forums, and even Slashdot. That's why it's such a shame that they're rendered almost entirely useless by the lack of a tagging standard with which tags from various sites and tag aggregators like Technorati and Del.icio.us can compare and relate tags to one another.
Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the blogosphere — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they're not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it.
I have to say, it would be nice to just learn one way of tagging content and using it everywhere.""
Isn't the power of tags that you can tag stuff however you want? To me a standard for tagging would be a negative thing.
I don't thing the problem is a standard for tagging, the problem is having a standard for sharing tags between applications. But that's another problem and it doesn't need to be solved to implement tagging itself.
I'm inclined to disagree that 'tags' are the answer here. I wrote my masters thesis on a method automatically generating semantic webs from plaintext. It's a huge problem with about a dozen different stages, but I had backing in all of my research from the psycholinguistics and computer-science field.
;-)
Herein lies the rub: You're never going to get everyone to agree on a set of appropriate tags. Even if you do, you'll never have them uniformly applied (well I find that humorous but you have it tagged as inappropriate).
There are other solutions here, such as automatic semantic generation. Hey, I never said it was an easy solution, but it's one that I'm certain can be accomplished. Flame away
Is not to tag everything like 13 year old cheerleaders.
How do you standardize something that has not been widely implemented before? It's great to say that it would be good idea to have one standard practice for tagging, but which one? There's no reason to make a huge fuss about this until it a least one clear contender for standardization emerges (which will probably happen on its own).
How to share and categorize information is an ages old problem. One man's trash is another man's treasure, likewise, one man's bread is another man's dietary problem.
I'm not sure, but haven't we already figured out that tagging would require more tags than the actual information being tagged to accomplish what the original poster was asking for?
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I don't feel that tags have enough significance behind them to merit a standard. I'd be more concerned with truth in journalism first, for my part.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Trying to standardize tags in the context of standardizing what they are, is hopeless. It'll be like the Unicode standard; too complex to use in its entirety.
But to standardize the format of tags and to standardize how to exchange tags between systems, is a great idea.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Which is why I tagged this article with "njkewjdkewd."
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He said "blogosphere." Instantly, I don't care.
Only thing worse would be something like, I dunno, "tags should be a Web 2.0 standard" or somesuch.
Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled - R Feynman
and here I thought the standard for tagging was for the first person to agree or disagree with the headline, then the next has to immediately disagree with the first person. 5 minutes down the line if no one has added another tag, the third must disgree with BOTH the first and the second poster. Finally, a serious slashdotter will show up to add a relevant tag, followed by the oh so frequent itsatrap and slownewsday tags.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Tags are human assigned labels for something that we don't have better meta-data for, or where we don't want to be bothered with formalism. If you want something formal, go use a proper taxonomy/ontology and put bucketloads of OWL or RDF-schema data on your site to define relationships, or use format with well defined semantics to add information. Noone is stopping you, and there are cases where formally defining relationships is worthwhile, such as when you want software agents to be able to infer stuff about the data. But that's not what tagging is used for. Tagging is used for ad-hoc manual classification in situations where it is good enough
Tagging, like anything else designed to be helpful, simply won't work if *anything* is allowed. For every person who tags something "correctly" in an effort to do good, how many people will deliberately mis-tag something to produce misleading results?
:)
Better to get rid of tagging altogether and go back to text searching!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I think by "blogosphere", you really mean "internet".
There is a standard but nobody uses it these days. Even the search engines disavow it anymore.
If someone gets started on a tagging standard right now, it might see a little use before the whole silly idea goes out of style next year.
The only tags I like are my own. The real use of other people's tags is to show how they organize information, not to help me find something. The problems the article brings up are only the beginning -- the natural tendency of a global tagging system is for the number of tags applied to an object to increase without bound. If I'm doing a master's thesis on, say, web design, I might tag any number of sites "thesis". Is that useful to anyone else? Probably not. But it will interfere with someone who's searching for sites about writing theses.
Visit the
We've got a standard for keywords in HTML documents. There's no problem there.
The only issue is what to do when there are multiple sub-documents on a single page, like if Slashdot allowed individual replies to be tagged.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I would add to this that slashdot tags tend to be not very useful.
/.ers who wrote the top rated comment where the only people allowed to set the tags.
Most of the time, the tags have little to do with the actual article (eg. yes, no, maybe, fud, notfud, flamebait). I thought the purpose of tags was to be able to find an article easily later on when it has been archived, and the usefulness of the tags I just mentioned for this purpose is dubious at best. I do not pretend to have a solution to this problem, but I think the situation would be improved if the editors or maybe the
The rel-tag microformat is an attempt to standardise tagging. It relies on other microformats to define what it is you are tagging. There isn't a 'photo' microformat at the moment, so you can't do a web-wide search for photos tagged 'fireworks' for example. If you're interested in the semantic web it's worth checking out microformats. You can download a plugin for firefox that reads microformats. Go and have a look at Flickr with it, or any other site that implements microformats. If people have tagged something with a 'geo' tag giving long. and lat. then it will bring up a Google Map showing the location. If they've included a 'hCard' around their contact details you can add it to your address book.