Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Tags and Tagging, What Is the Best Way Forward?
siliconbits writes "The debate about tagging has been going for nearly a decade. Slashdot has covered it a number of times.
But it seems that nobody has yet to come up with a foolproof solution to tagging. Even luminaries like Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo and Slashdot all have different tagging schemes. Commontag, a venture launched in 2009 to tackle tagging, has proved to be all but a failure despite the backing of heavyweights like Freebase, Yahoo and Zemanta. Even Google gave up and purchased Freebase in July 2010. Somehow I remain convinced that a unified, semantically-based solution, using a mix of folksonomy and taxonomy, is the Graal of tagging. I'd like to hear from fellow Slashdotters as to how they tackle the issue of creating and maintaining a tagging solution, regardless of the platform and the technologies being used in the backend." A good time to note: there may be no pretty way to get at them, but finding stories with a particular tag on Slashdot is simple, at least one at a time: Just fill in a tag you'd like to explore after "slashdot.org/tag/", as in "slashdot.org/tag/bizarro."
Are we talking about labeling, tagging in the version control sense, egocentric graffiti? Can't figure it out from the summary.
I do not think "luminaries" means what you think it means.
Also, WTF is Graal?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Ahem!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
What are these supposed technical fields that don't use tagging or metadata?
So, you've never used images? Never used a camera phone? Never used gmail? Never used bookmarks in firefox? You're in a business and never used Outlook? Never listened to a MP3 file? Never used windows and clicked on the file explorer to add columns? Never written a web page, or XML? Never used a TIFF file? Where exactly is this mythological technical person and what do they do?