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?"

Comments

Re:future patenting and copyright claims?

[flooey]

sorry, not a lawyer so probably mixing up patenting and copyrighting

Just because this is commonly mixed up, I figured I'd let you know that you're actually talking about trademarks, the third major kind of intellectual property (along with patents and copyright).

Patents are concerned with new and novel (at least, in theory) inventions and give the holder of the patent a monopoly over whatever was patented in exchange for telling the entire world how to make whatever it is.

Copyright is concerned with creative works (including software code, nowadays) and prevents people from distributing or creating derivatives of them without the creator's permission.

Trademark is concerned with the naming of things and is intended to prevent customer confusion by keeping two entities from naming products in very similar ways.

Of the three, I personally think trademark is the one that's set up the best. If you don't actually use your trademark, you lose it, and the only basis to claim infringement is the likelihood of customer confusion. Thus, you can have Bass beer along with Bass shoe stores, but you can't name your new clothing store Target.

Whatever it's called, it's still Metadata

[macguys]

However, having a standard is important for interopperability. I suggest that folk look at the Dublin Core metadata standards. Check out the Wikipedia article on Dublin Core.

Re:what is a tag ?

[theStorminMormon]

No, on Slashdot, there is a depraved vocal minority that wants to feel like they are okay objectifying women in selfish, addictive, and animal-like ways.

I'm sorry, but the minority is definitely those Slashdot users who don't have teh pronzorz on their computer. It's not a vocal minority that looks porn - it's practically every IT user in existence. There are only a handful of tech-savy individuals who, for any reason, don't like porn. They are out there, however.

As far as your characterization of porn, I find it more or less dead-on. Of course everyone on Slashdot thinks there's no difference between having sex and watching sex (see other replies). I have to wonder how much of that has to do with the fact that they watch too much porn and don't actually have sex very often? Sour grapes, perhaps? Or just inexperience? Because I can say that I quite enjoy having sex, even though I don't watch pron.

I'm not a Baptist; I'm just getting tired of the stereotype that techies are perverts and that if you belong to that *club* that makes porn acceptable.

Pron is not just "acceptable". It's an article of faith. You can get into a lot of trouble for questioning pron. That's kind of what my sig is all about.

What happened to the techie that had a sister or a mother or a cute little daughter and wanted to protect them from exploitation?

Pron isn't exploitation, it's a "career choice" (quoted from another reply). Personally I've noticed two things. First of all, the most promiscuos people I know also have the lowest self-esteem. Correlation or causation - I don't know, but it certainly seems as though there's a definite negative connection between pron and mental/emotional/psychological health. Anecdotal, I know, but there it is.

Secondly, we already know that pron is also both addictive and psychological dangerous to the watcher. So much so, that you can't get any studies approved to have people watch pron. For some reason, no one seems to think seriously about what that means. It's like smoking for your brain. Some smokers live to be 100 and die skydiving, but the general connection between smoking and lung-cancer is indisputable, and anyone that tried to do research by asking non-smokers to smoke would be laughed out of their job.

So yeah, welcome to the decided minority of techies who are opposed to pron.

-stormin (for the record, I'm also against creationism)

Re:what is a tag ?

[Omestes]

I don't think porn is really a "article of faith", I haven't heard anyone seriously proselytise porn, its more a running joke, like how many /.ers REALLY live in their mother's basement? Nor have I heard any confusion between porn and actual sex, they are rather hard to confuse, after all. And to be honest, this is the first time I've even seen someone question porn, mostly because rarely are moral issues the topic of /. By all means question it, in its place, there are real social problems associated with it, but generally /. is not the place for it being mostly a science and technology site. To be honest, most of the opinions I've heard against porn are religious moral arguments, which in my opinion are pointless to people who don't buy into a specific moral dogma, it would be nice to see an actual rational (and empirical) discussion on it, though I still doubt whether /. is the place for it (being generally off topic, average maturity level, etc).

And to be pedantic, please excuse me this pleasure, your third from last paragraph:

Pron isn't exploitation, it's a "career choice" (quoted from another reply). Personally I've noticed two things. First of all, the most promiscuos people I know also have the lowest self-esteem. Correlation or causation - I don't know, but it certainly seems as though there's a definite negative connection between pron and mental/emotional/psychological health. Anecdotal, I know, but there it is.

...is fallacious. You use the word "seems", then admit your "seeming" connection as anecdotal, and then say you know the connection "is true". How can you get truth from something that "seems" and is anecdotal? You can get, perhaps, an informed opinion from this chain, but not certainty or knowledge. Yes, this is me being pedantic.

Personally I enjoy both sex and porn, though if given an exclusive choice I would always accept the former. Some people even enjoy watching porn before or during sex. I don't see the implied mutual exclusivity between liking porn, and liking sex. I think that this irrelevant towards potential real issues on porn. Though, we must realize that porn has been around as long as men, and society still hasn't ended. Porn is a universal. I think porn might be like violent video games/media, the people affected adversely by it have a previous issue that increases their susceptibility to fantasy situations. The average porn viewer is probably not a rapist, or in any other way abnormal, but there will always be a minority of outliers where it becomes a problem, but porn (or your stimulus oif choice) will just be a trigger for a deeper problem. Porn is not a cause.

As for workers in the porn/sex industry, I have anecdotal evidence to the contrary. In college I was friends with several strippers, or exotic dancers, none of whom had "self-esteem" issues. It was an easy way to pay tuition for them, and they felt flattered by the attention. I accept that this is not a universal, only an observation like yours.