blog.erik.rainey.name

Dear Galt, I love it. I love it too much in fact. It caters to my OCD tendancies and I know I spend far too much time doing it. It's just that it feels so damn good to get my bookmarks sorted. It's the same sort of feeling one gets from a clean house or an organized desk. It feels efficient, powerful, sleek and functional. Well I guess you have to like that sort of thing. Anyway the purpose of this post is to help those who are unfamiliar with tagging (Hi Mom!) to get a better grip on what it is and how to use it effectively.

First, what is it? I define it as "the Art of non-heirarchical, potentially orthagonal, data organization". This means that tags are meta-data which can be used to sort your normal data in a way that does not fit into a layered series of "folders" (non-heirarchical) and that may be applied across your data in ways that form matrix-like structures (as in tables, not dystopias). For example, take my del.icio.us bookmarks. I use the term Art because this is not an area which can tolerate a set of strict rules, but instead, must use a set of fuzzy or flexible rules which allow for adaptation and possibly paradoxes. If you use a system of tagging which is too restrictive you will find that some data can't be organized with it, but if you use a system that is too loose, you'll find that it is ultimately useless. The utility of the system is somewhere in between, and finding that is an Art (as in "a skill that is attained by study, practice, or observation, which arises from the exercise of intuitive faculties." Not as in "the human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature", which incidently is a bad definition is a bad definition in and of itself.)

Basically, tagging is only useful if you maintain a consistent organization policy. You must use the same methodology to sort all your tags. You can't expect to have a useful tagging system if you change the way you sort, half-way through your bookmark imports, or in a year from now. Now I'm not saying that you can't change the way you might organize your tags in the future, you should just reorganize all your preexisting tags to fit the new heirarchy.

Tagging cuts to the core on a lot of deep computer science issues which I am not well versed enough in, nor qualified to lecture about. If you are interested in formal systems like tagging you can look up such concepts as Godel's Incompleteness Theorem as more verbosely described in Godel, Escher, Bach. On a less mathmatical note, you should also read up on Folksonomy, which is basically the uncontrolled result of the internet comming up with a tagging system. They are unsystematic and rather noisesome. I'd steer clear of trying to adhere to what you might think is "the way the people on the internet" do tagging because it generally stinks.

There are only a few rules about how to tag when you break it down to fundamentals.

• Use of Multiple Orthagonal Heirarchies
• Topical Coherence
• Consistent Usage
• Editing (revisting your organization)

The whole point of tagging is really summed up in the first item (the rest are for better usage of the concept).

Most people keep their bookmarks in complex, nested folder systems. When they file a bookmark they'll put it in the place that seems most logical at the time. The question is, will you find that organization logical when you try to look it up later? With tagging you simply put all the relevant information you could possible organize that link with into the tags and when you go to look it up later, you simply need to look it up only one of those terms.

Lets take a look at my del.icio.us links to see what I mean.

I sort of several different heirarchies which are not necessarily related to each other (thus, orthagonal). Typically I use:

• Site Type: blog, portal, email, stores, etc...
• Topics Covered: news, gadgets, electronics, ruby, etc...
• Heirarchal Topics, like: mac osx software drivers
• Frequency of my visits: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly

This sort of organization allows me to really decribe the content of the site, the site itself (in a meta sense) and how I use the site. For example, check out my link for Global Reset's site. It's a blog I visit on a daily basis, thus I tagged it with "daily" and "blog" but it contains a lot more than just some dumb blog. Since Scott has been so kind as to mention in his byline that he's a tivo addict and mac user I can tag his site with that info as well. Now, the next time I think, "you know I seem to remember some site I went to and bookmarked that talked about that problem I was having in typo", I can narrow my search by using my tagging system to only look at the sites I've tagged as "typo" sites.

Let's look as at another example.

Let's say that I am a new mac user and I'm bookmarking all the new software I download on my MacBook Pro so that I can check it weekly or monthly or whenever and update it as necessary. So, using this system I would tag the bookmarks with "mac osx software monthly" for monthly updates or use whatever time frame I would want. Not only can I get a folder like presentation with this system, but I can then also have a list of all the sites I need to visit on whatever time period I like. You can then make a firefox RSS bookmark for your "monthly" sites and just schedule some time for yourself to cruise all of them once a month. You'll notice that some of those links in my mac osx software list also have other tags on them. This is part of the power of the tagging mindset. I only need to record that bookmark once with tagging, where before I had to place the bookmark in multiple locations in my bookmark folders and maintain all of them. Here, I maintain one link with some meta-data.

So in summation, tagging is just a system of organization which allows you to sort your data in a very flexible way with less work maintaining that organization.