I just ran across agkamai’s Cat2Tag plugin for Wordpress — looks great. My first suggestion would be to add type-ahead tag guessing like on the del.icio.us post interface.

Here’s a bookmarklet that produces a popup version of the latest and greatest del.icio.us post interface. It grabs the selected text for the “extended” field and prompts you if nothing is selected. You can strip out the if you don't like that part...

popup post to del.icio.us

I’ve been thinking about tagging UI as well, and this discussion about tags, commas, spaces, etc got me thinking a bit more today. For one, I tend to agree that spaces are bad delimiters, and I agree that “what’s wrong with commas, anyway?”. More importantly, however, is how to get users to understand how to use a delimiter. As others have noted, they do understand the comma as a delimiter for email addresses, but search engines have trained us to use spaces to seperate words in free text fields.

So, here’s an idea – what about a dynamic UI that provides some visual feedback as I type. If I type without any delimiters, each word is highlighted seperately (two "tags"). A visual cue (perhaps a comma fading in to the right of the text field?) reminds me of the delimiter. If the user then adds a comma -- -- then the highlighting changes to show that the words are treated as a phrase, or single "tag". Here's a crude illustration of how I'm thinking it would look:

I'm sure someone can figure out how to do this sort of word-by-word highlighting inside an HTML form field...

I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal today. Of course, my name isn’t exactly Bowen Delle, but that’s pretty close — and not nearly as bad as some other corruptions I’ve heard.

So, why bother with “tagging”, or a service like del.icio.us? Who, you might ask, has the time to think up and key in a bunch of descriptive keywords for every bookmark. Just bookmark it and… forget it!

Exactly.

I look in on my old IE or more recent Firefox bookmarks very rarely. In fact, there’s only one Firefox bookmark that I use with any regularity (aside from those in my “Bookmarks Toolbar”) — and that’s for the status page of our WiFi router. I don’t use the others because I’ve simply forgotten about them – they’re buried deep in folders, locked on my hard drive, invisible.

Joshua makes a nice point in his interview with Jeremy Wagstaff: “Search is more associated with the recall, whereas tagging is more associated with the storage.” Quite right, because of course an individual doesn’t really have much opportunity to “store” things in general on the internet – after all, your blog (if you have one) is just one of several billion web pages. Search is broad yet shallow, in terms of personal differentiation. Bookmarks, whether on your hard drive on with a service like del.icio.us, are narrow but much deeper, richer, more satisfying on a personal basis. You can’t find anything and everything on the internet in your bookmarks, but you can (hopefully) find those things that you care about most.

So, why use del.icio.us (or one of the others) instead of your browser’s own bookmarks?

1) Central storage: A online bookmarking service is accessible from anywhere you use the internet, not just one PC. This applies to any of the services, including toolbar-based bookmark services like Yahoo and A9. Del.icio.us can be intergrated into Firefox with Foxylicious and various bookmarklets. Someone could also easily build a del.icio.us toolbar.

2) Personal and global view: An online service lets me see not only my own bookmarks, but those of other people. In data-architecture terms, I can pivot on any one of at least three axes: person, URL, and tag. Just for starters, I can see who else has bookmarked the URL that I did, what other URL’s that person has bookmarked, and what other bookmarks have been tagged with the same tag. This is social networking with some real utility. Friendster is fun and all, but once you’ve gotten all your friends to sign up, there’s not much reason to go back unless you’re looking for dates.

3) Integration: Like many other new-school web services, del.icio.us has open API’s, which allows people to build services that talk to and leverage del.icio.us. Contrary to the prehistoric thinking of some developers, your worth is not measured in how much you keep others from knowing — it’s measured in often what you know is used. Check out some of the experiments floating around del.icio.us.

4) Tagging: Although I came upon the idea by way of del.icio.us, tagging can be applied to almost any application, including browser-based bookmarks. The advantage with an online service is that I can pivot on tags not only within my own data, but across other people’s bookmarks and even across other services.

More on this later…

PS – AAPL is up to 73, which means I’m almost to my Mini. Now lookee there — I wonder if Apple chose the name in part for the affinity with the other Mini. In the meantime, I’m reading up on Mac software… Also, they’re not exactly rare any more, but I have plenty of Gmail invites – let me know if you want one.

Jeremy Wagstaff of WSJ/Dow Jones called today, asking what this “tagging” thing is all about. Remember the 80’s? Tagging was something else entirely then. Par for the course for a new-school journalist, he interviewed me via Trillian from Indonesia, and asked if it was OK to blog about our conversation. That prompted me to revisit my blog, since I’ve been somewhat OTA for a while.

So when I went and logged into WordPress, I found a post that I had drafted a few months ago. I had already been writing about tagging and tag-centric views, and having just been down at the Technorati Hackathon I was musing about how trackback is an imperfect pivot for following conversations:

I posted last night about the hackathon, and linked to the wiki. Technorati shows only one other person linking to that URL — so where are all the hackers? Is looks like more people linked to Dave Sifry’s announcement page…. So, which URL to include in my post, so that it’s properly connected to the Technorati Cosmos?

This is of course quite relevant to the topic of the day. Trackback sucks because even though URLs are good unique identifiers, they don’t carry enough semantic weight to serve as useful pivots in information space. Technorati is a partial solution to the trackback problem, because even though it provides a central place (an anchor for pivoting on URL’s), if I’m writing about a topic and I want to link to other conversations on that topic, linking to one and only one URL that might have to do with that topic is both insufficient and cumbersome. By linking to the URL for the Technorati Hackathon Wiki or to Dave Sifry’s announcement of that event, I was asserting that my post was related to one or the other (or both) of those specific entities, thereby excluding reference to anything else.

On the other hand, if I include (as I did) a reference to a broader concept, such as my “technorati” tag, then I can easily pivot on that tag, linking to other entries [throughout the web] on that basis. That’s what I was writing about back in April of last year, that’s why I started calling my WordPress categories “tags”, and that’s why I pulled together blog entries and del.icio.us posts, and then eventually photo tags into a tag-centric navigation system on my blog. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have come up with this — but it does look a hell of a lot like Technorati’s tag aggregator.

So, what’s with all the hype? Tagging isn’t anything new — it’s just simple meta-data, applied in a flat (vs. hierarchical) namespace. It’s basically open source for information classification; the opposite of both the brute-force computational approach (”AI”), and the top-down, fewer-experts-know-best method (libraries, Yahoo in 1996). I’ve always thought that rigorous taxonomies are not “profitable” in terms of information management; they cost more to maintain than the value they add minus the error rate. It might be true that taxonomies can only be maintained successfully as public goods, e.g. the Dewey Decimal system, the domain name system, etc. Google leapt ahead by combining the machine approach with some of the benefits of the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’: PageRank. But this is still implicit/implied vs. declared data. That’s what it comes down to: can you reach a more accurate understanding of what something is about via interpretation of the content itself, or by examining the aggregate of what author(s), readers, and commentators declare?

I can also understand the point of view of those who think that it’s optimistic and naive to believe that aggregate amateur metadata is of real worth. I haven’t had to time to digest all of the discussion on the topic, and there’s probably something I’m missing in their criticism. But, my own experience — not just in blogging, but in application and data architecture in general, tells me that there is real value here. delicious is certainly a testament to that.

So it’s not technology — it’s the applications. For me, it was a combination of blogging and delicious that brought the utility of tags to the fore. Once I saw applications like Flickr and gmail using the same concept I began to think more about how to bulid further. I have a few more ideas on the topic; it should be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks. I’ll try to keep more up to date, as “tagging” is clearly exploding.

In the meantime, let me be one of the first to cast a vote against the horrible, awkward term: folksonomy. Really, folks, we can come up with something better. We certainly should.

Now that I’ve re-enabled tags (aka categories), I wanted to sync my WordPress tag navigation with del.icio.us, pulling in the del.icio.us links for the given tag. I’m not sure why some folks are set on creating blog entries for del.icio.us links; this seems like duplication of data to me. In any case, I just grabbed Magpie, and then wrote template-functions-rss.php, which grabs the RSS feed of links for the given tag (e.g. http://del.icio.us/rss/bdwelle/programming), and spits it out in HTML. Very, very straightforward.

In the meantime, I had to do a fair bit of hacking in the WordPress source. What a mess! I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again — tons of poor coding. Some functions return arrays or strings, some just barf out echos all over the place. Some functions do formatting, some don’t. Do I use post->ID or post_id? What’s global? Answer: Everything! Anyhow, it works, and I still like it well enough not to switch back to MT.

There some nice code hidden in Yoz Grahame’s avar.icio.us bookmarklet that does tag autocompletion and suggests secondary tags based on the primary tag. Great stuff.

Inspiried by “this example”:http://www.blurty.com/talkread.bml?journal=marcn&itemid=55194, I cooked up a bookmarklet for delicious that copies the selected text into the extended field on the delicious post form. Unlike the original, the extended description in optional. It works in “Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/.

Just drag this to your bookmark toolbar del.icio.us post

(thanks to “Jesse Ruderman”:http://www.squarefree.com/ for the CSS for the button — very nice.)

Update: Seb made a nice tweak that uses the main delicious page to post, which has the benefit of displaying previous post and tags…

Microsoft is losing… I’ve been using Opera now for months, and I only use IE for a few sites that misbehave. I got so sick of Outlook’s UI and flaky IMAP sent-mail handling that I went on an mua search a while back, and now I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird now for a while. It’s solid, the UI is clean, it has good (and customizable) keyboard shortcuts, and IMAP works reliably. The only thing I still use Outlook for is contacts, calendar and task list. Outlook’s calendar and task list are actually pretty good, but what I’d really like is an app that would replace those functions, integrate with Thunderbird, and also make my PIM data available online automatically. Anyone?

I spent the entire day today building the scow pier for Hoofers. Driving the crane barge and running a team of volunteers to lay steel girders and decking out into the lake so I can sail next weekend! It feels great to do physical work, and building that pier required a good bit of problem-solving and finesse with the outboard. Reminded me a bit of the old shipyard days. Good stuff.

Veen mentioned cycling in the rain the other day — I think the same day that I rode home from school in the rain myself. I’m trying to be more of a bicycle commuter — and yes, I probably look like a dork with my fenders and clip-on briefcase, but again the physical activity feels good. I actually find myself wishing that I lived a little farther from school & work, because it’s not really far enough to make for a real ride. It’s quick & convenient, but when I get going, I wouldn’t mind going a bit farther.

A follow-up note on my last post: really, formal ontologies have always seemed largely a waste of time. Most efforts to classify information fail to add more value than they cost to produce and maintain, not to mention the friction they introduce in terms of spurious classification. I think that a lot of the reason that ontologies (e.g. email folders, the “open directory”, Yahoo’s categories) have seemed so important in the past was the lack of robust immediate search functionality. An ontology is essentially an attempt at an index of a summary of the whole body of information. That summary is only required when you can’t efficiently index the information directly. With search like Google and mail tools like Opera’s M2, you don’t need to introduce a layer of categorization to find what you’re looking for — you simply search for the original content. With the need to categorize for the purpose of summarization eliminated, we can now use “categories” to add meaning in a social context, which is what del.icio.us does.

I had an idea for a del.icio.us-style app last night… One thing del.icio.us lets you do is discover who happens to have the same taste/interests in webstuff; its main facts are people and URL’s, and you can pivot on either. I think it might be interesting to do this in a more product-focused way… Ever want to know who other listeners of your favorite but obscure radio station are? Or the digital camera that love? Or your favorite book, booze, or band? You could see who else has the same del.icio.us bookmark, but a service designed specifically to let you affiliate yourself with specific products might work better. Or maybe it’s the same thing. Thoughts?

Looking through the language tags on del.icio.us, I ran across the the Plain English Campaign… Timely because I just had a very lengthy discussion with a business associate about the value of being purposefully imprecise. He was arguing that we should use a phrase like “coming under the wing” to describe a partnership, so that it could be interpreted in different ways in different contexts. To me, that just seems plain wrong. Why say something that pretends to explain a relationship, when the statement creates more questions than answers? (i.e. what in the world do you mean by ‘coming under the wing’ ?!?) Why oh why! would we want to use such a meaningless phrase, when we could just say what we mean? Just say it. I think I convinced him. Stay tuned.

There was a piece in The Isthumus (Madison’s free weekly) this morning speaking against an ongoing effort to get a light rail system built here in Madtown. The author noted that well-designed express bus service (aka Bus Rapid Transit) can do everything light rail can do, and serve the same ridership for an order of magnitude less cost. I agree. Trains are sexy, but if you can make a bus look and act like a train, and it costs 10x less, there’s no argument.

A detailed review of the latest Nokia that I have been thinking I want finally came out, and it backs up my statements the other day about Nokia falling behind. I love their UI, but if this is best they can do, I’m going to keep looking. Anyone seen the Sharp GX32?

Why is del.icio.us cooler? I suppose because it’s simple (MT seems like overkill for bookmarks), it has categories, it’s the social web, and I like the way the guy who runs it does things — he’s got a number of other interesting projects going. So, I replaced my hand-rolled linkroll with a bit of php that pulls in my del.icio.us links. It even has a handy one-click posty-thingie gizmo! Take that, MT!