tagging conventions - more rants
I just spent entire 5 minutes of my life trying to figure out why RawSugar was issuing error messages ("illegal character") while I was trying to add a new URL to it. Only then did I notice that I am using the flickr tagging convention (space seperated, "multi word tags"), instead of the RawSuggar convention (comma seperated, it's-always-a-mutag).
Oh well.
Standards Are A Good Thing.
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6 comments:
Hi Yaniv,
My name is Guy Tavor, and I'm managing the product for RawSugar.
I have read your posts and ideas on tagging and folksonomies, including this post.
I would love to hear more of your input, in our never ending quest to make our product better.
p.s. many of our users actually prefer the comma delimited tags, as it allows them to make their hierarchies much more presentable and show case them to everyone on the web. i.e. http://www.rawsugar.com/collections/FitnessSage with tags like: "fintness tips", "bodyweight exercise".
You can contact me by e-mail at guy*at*RawSugar.com.
You're invited to our R&D Offices in Israel.
Thanks for the feedback Guy.
Comma delimited is a good thing, what's frustrating is that it's not a convention. Many of us users use several tagging sites, and conformity would make things easier. It will happen anyway when MS steps in and adds built-in desktop tagging to Windows Explorer :)
Also, I am not sure I see why commas and hierarchies are related. You could do flat tagging with commas and you could do hierarchical tagging with "space delimited", I don't see a limitation in either.
i'd say some kind of auto-complete (a-la google suggest http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1) should be the next step.
You usually have a small set of tags you frequently use and an auto complete UI will really help here.
i agree, though i still have to see a webbish implementation of auto-complete that works as well as the native windows version, with regards to mouse and keyboard logic.
Until this happen, we may be better off with a simpler UI for auto-complete, such as disconnected list below the text box or to its right, from which you have to explicity choose an item.
Here's one that seems to do a pretty good job (at least compared to others i've seen)
http://www.codeproject.com/jscript/jsactb.asp
What's also nice about it is the delimiter support (perfect for tags) - the autocomplete works for each word seperatly.
you are right, it's a pretty good implementation. Simple, and behaves exactly as expected, no surprises. I wonder how it fares with a large list of items. Sometimes 30 items can be a "large list" for JavaScript code :)
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