Infinitely meta

DIY mirror project. v1. essential for bending streams
Originally uploaded by pplpwrd
A new name for my poor neglected blog. I do intend to eventually migrate this to a custom Wordpress setup, but for now this will do. Just configured blogger to point to one of my existing domains.

With that I welcome you to infinitely meta.

I'll explain the concept behind infinitely meta in a future post.

post on need for tagging standards makes del.icio.us most popular page

Just came across a recent post focusing on the need for standards (or not) for tagging systems. Furthers my case that we need to do something about these tagging systems or we're never going to be able to bring it to masses.

[UPDATE: Via trackback links on the above article, I read this post, and left this response to the author. ]

I think the KISS model is highly applicable in this case. Simple, effective tagging systems that all share the same baseline features might help, but may not address the inherent issues that crop up in socially-driven systems like del.icio.us and other sites.

My comments are really focused on the need for some level of commonality and consistency across tagging systems in the following areas:

• Ability to gracefully handle compound words, phrases, and multi-word tags. Space, no space, quotes, whatever. Pick one.
• Spell checking. FF2.0 brings this into the fold, but spelling errors in tags results in bloated and inaccurate tag clouds.
• Better equivalence detection capabilities - singular vs. plural, synonyms, typos, etc.
• Better tag management - for example, right now, on del.icio.us, I can only delete one tag at a time. Tag replacement helps me get rid of equivalents, but only one at a time.

What do you think?

Tags: tagging, tag, del.icio.us, commentary, standards, metadata, issue, feature, web2.0, socialsoftware, social bookmarking