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Labels Not Tags, Says Google
Ashraf Al Shafaki writes "The word 'tags' is the one in common use on the Web today and is one of the distinctive features of Web 2.0. Ever since Gmail came out, Google has decided to use the term 'label' instead of the term 'tag' despite they are basically the exact same thing and have the exact same function. Why is Google using inconsistent terminology in its products for such an important term? Is there a real difference between a tag and a label?"
'Tagging' is when you put a mark on someone else's property... Hence maybe tagging is what other people do to your content (as here on slashdot) whereas labelling is what you do to your gmail messages... uh, maybe.
Maybe google just think tagging sounds like graffiti-talk...
Hardware is the easy part. The hard part is looking at a pile of a million things and trying to figure out what the tags are on that document you were writing last month.
It's a stupid idea. Filing is not about searching blindly in the style of google. Filing is about having a SYSTEM for categorising things, so that you can figure out what categories any given thing belongs in. Once you have such a system, the easiest way to implement that in software? Directories.
Sloppy labels only look good to people who have never had anything resembling a filing system, and instead just lose their documents.
I've thought about it but I think the idea needs a lot of work that's not being done.
For one, tagging needs to be a lot easier, it's easy to make a folder to drop files into, but there's nothing I've used yet where I can drop items into a "tag folder" to automatically tag them. I think a hybrid system is the way to go, I might have two groups of files that are in folders of the same folder name, but they have different parent folders for a reason, to exclude them from each other, and searching systems usually don't let me take that into account.
Anyway, what I'm saying is that I've had too many circumstances that spelunking folders was easier to do than performing a search and adding the correct exclusions to get what I want, to justify getting rid of the folder system. Maybe what is needed is a nested tagging system, subtags, I don't know, because sometimes a heirarchical system is the most effective way to find something.