You'll notice that the Tag cloud has returned, as well as a radical shift in the weight of most of the tags due to a great blog-fission that has happened. Right nwo I just have to clean up after a few missed entries, and the split will be complete.

Something struck me while I was reading Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere (Feb 2006, Part 1). It wasn't what he was saying about the growing number of bloggers, nor was it the relationship between daily postings and newsworthy events. What got me was tags. It wasn't even the part about how tagging is on the rise, but rather the tags used to tag this particular blog posting:

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogs, blogsearch, postingvolume, posts, postvolume, pr, scaling, search, search engine, sotb, sotb2006, spam, spamblog, statistics, stats, tags, technorati, technoratijapan, technoratitag, weblog

What got me was the style that he used to tag his entries. Here is another set of tags from a different entry:

Technorati Tags: blogsearch, developer, employment, job, joboffer, joboffered, php, san francisco, technorati

See, if I were to tag either of those entries, my set of tags on the first entry would be: blog, search, postvolume, pr, scaling, search, sotb, 2006, spam, stats, tags, technorati, japan. the tags blogosphere, blogsearch, search engine, sotb2006, spamblog, statistics, technoratijapan and technoratitag are, in the way that I approach tagging, redundant and like weeds in my personal tag garden. Now this is not to say that the founder of Technorati doesn't know how to tag. It is just to say that our style of tag-gardening is different. I tag my blog entries for personal storage and retrieval. If I want to find all of the posts I made about my music, I would do a search on the tag intersection of "music" and "mine". If I want to talk about PHP jobs, I would search for the (currently hypothetical) intersection between php and jobs. I depend on tag intersections giving me the information I need. This allows me to do things like get a list of blog postings that I have done related to my creative output (musical, programming, artistic or otherwise) by hitting the tag mine. I can drill into, our out of tags as needed.

Now, the approach that Mr Sifry takes seems to be different. If I may venture a guess as to how and why he is tagging, I'll lay bets that he is tagging for the world around him. The overloading of terms (job, joboffer, joboffered) seems more intent on making an impression on a search engine (like technorati, for instance) rather then for personal organization. Given that his blog rating is at ranking 811, versus 574,635 (my own ranking) this makes sense.

So, how you tag depends on what you use tags for. I want to be able to collect and search my own material (photos, blog entries, bookmarks, etc.), and I find searching on tag intersections much more interesting and edifying, so I format my tags accordingly, and spend a lot of time pruning and taking care of my tag gardens. But it makes me wonder if the tag gardens I am growing are the most user friendly in the world.

Another freetag plugin beta for all'y'all. (Previous beta was Here)

I've modified the tag list on the entry screen to be a little more user friendly, modified the RSS output a tad, and changed the output of the default css to be a little friendlier, especially when using my CSS optimization.

Tag intersections should be coming soon, I am really craving them. I just have to hack on the SQL a little more. Right now It is looking like a really massive (and bad) left join query that gets worse as you intersect more tags.

Install Instructions

• Un-tar to your plugins directory
• Go to your plugin administration, and configure the sidebar plugin. If your database needs to be upgraded, it will happen automagickally
• Bask in taggy goodness!

In his entry Tag clouds are the new mullets, Jeffrey Zeldman rails against 'tag clouds' ('Show All Tagged Entries' box to your right is a tag cloud).

Like mood rings and fanny packs, like mullets and the Macarena, the weighted tag clouds meme popularized by Flickr and Technorati is about to cross a permanent cultural shame threshold. Brilliant as the idea remains, faddishness is choking its air supply. Damned clouds are everywhere.

Except, that seems to be about the extent of his criticism. Tag clouds are popular, and therefore they are bad! Well, finally he starts to come up with some reasons why tagging and tag clouds are bad, beyond the ever popular 'It is popular, and therefore bad' meme.

One of the biggest problems I have with this article is that he insists on shoe-horning tags into some kind of method of primary website navigation. Yes, tagging and folksonomies are all about presenting a navigational aid to the user, but no one in their right mind would consider using a tag cloud as a primary navigational aid. In fact, in most instances where I have seen tagging applied, it is about the users applying tags to their own content, be it sounds, photos, blog entries, goals, or bookmarks. You might notice that I have been deliberately ignoring the word 'category'. Tagging is related to categories to be sure, but tagging something is different from categorizing it.

Another particularly annoying point he makes is the disconnection between parent child relationships. In a tag based folksonomy 'Eight Mile' would be disconnected from 'Detroit' and 'United States of America'. This is one of the known limitations of tags. Tags by nature are flat. Complaining that they are not, is like complaining that a hierarchical taxonomy has too much nesting. It comes with the territory.

Mr. Zeldman rails against popularity a second time, particularly in tag views that show you the most popular tags. His biggest beef seems to be that if you blog aboutf beautiful sunny 'Taksim', its going to be lost in the popularity list, because everyone else is busy using the tags 'cool', 'politics' and 'ajax'. The least popular terms disappear. This is a-okay. because it lets the taggers know which terms are popular, so they can use them (assuming they fit) and more importantly, lets you know which terms need to be filled out more. The code tag that you have been using? Kill it and decentralize to 'scheme', 'javascript' and 'php' instead. Or even better, keep using it, but sub-tag your code tag. (Oops, look! Flexible subcategories!) This popularity list does have limited use, but luckily most tag applications don't limit you there. Read what Nicolas Jon (?) has to say in response to Mr. Zeldman:

When tag clouds are sliced yet again — by time, another tag or two, a keyword, an author — they start showing their power. Technorati and Blogdex know this about links, and slice their data according to time (typically one day). Del.ico.us, which serves a similar purpose to Blogdex and Technorati but works on a totally different principle, uses time to slice the information presented on their main page as well.

This use of tag clouds shows that they are just in their infancy. There’s a lot more to them we haven’t seen publicly

Further, Zeldman goes on to say:

(There is no merit to [tagging] on single-author sites, where one person creates all the content and all the tags. If you don’t have a clear purpose for your site, who does?)

I beg to differ. I better, since this is a single author site, and I tag like a madman. Certainly in a corporate brochure website, any kind of tag-based classification and navigation makes little sense. But blogging? Much different. By looking at the tags, you have a pretty clear picture of what my blog is about, and even, what I am about. My Tag cloud tells me that I spend too much time writing about politics, and not enough ranting about code, Shell, or perversion. It is probably one of the best ways to browse my archives.

In the comments for this entry, an anonymous contributor snarked "I dont[sic] like tag clouds because they compete with my overpriced advice on how the navigation for a site should be setup.". While this comment is particularly nasty, I think it does touch on a truth, especially when at the end of his article Zeldman concludes:

Tag clouds harness all that mindless accidental randomness and make it the driving engine for navigating deep, ever-expanding content troves. Older ways, based on library science, undoubtedly suffer from the disadvantage of not being new. But they help people find what they need. And that is what navigation should do.

The conclusion seems so loaded with language... "harness all that mindless accidental randomness and make it the driving engine for navigating deep, ever-expanding content troves"? What a mouth full. It's tags versus taxonomies folks. Why is there a false dichotomy here? It really does seem to me that Mr. Zeldman has an agenda here, or at least it seems like he really hasn't looked at tags deeply enough. Now I am not out to trash his reputation. Maybe he just missed out. Maybe he didn't drink the Folksonomy Kool-Ade whilst I, admittedly, am drinking like a fish.

Technorati have finally gotten back to me about how to set multiple tags in the RSS/Atom feeds. Horray! The long and short of it is here: Technorati Developer Tag Help.

So the next step is to make the freetag plugin integrate with the RSS feeds. I'd also like to get some kind of 'tag definition' and 'tag tagging' happening. Tag definitions are easy, it would be a text description of a tag. Tag tagging would let you tag tags with other tags... which is to say, I could tag 's9y' with 'php'; tag 'php' and 'scheme' with 'code', and they would all link together. (so by tagging something with 's9y', it would automagickally fill in 'php' and 'code' for me).

All this is leading up to a better tag page. Right now hen you go to the page for my homo tag, you are presented with a list of related tags, and all posts that are related to "homo". In the future, It should give the tag defenition, any 'meta-tags' associated with it, and grab some other tagged media. flickr pictures, del.icio.us links being the first two, but ideally it should be sub-plugin-based, so that one could easily integrate Technorati, colr, or even freesound

If you want to help beta test the plugin, it is available Here. Just un-tar to your plugins directory.

Del.icio.us is... well... delicious. It is an awesome method to store and organize your bookmarks. Here is one of the many reasons why. I have been marking certain links as "pluckme" for a little while now. What is this "pluckme"? It is just a short-hand way of saying "Download these web-pages into my PDA for further reading". Now, with Sunrise desktop (the software that talks to plucker) , you can view RSS feeds (An RSS fee is a 'stock-ticker' of information, links in this case). The final piece of the puzzle is the Del.icio.us RSS feeds. I am sure you can put it all together.

If I find a link I like, I just tell delish that I want to pluck it by giving it a 'pluckme' tag along with a special sub tag 'pluckme:1deep' or 'pluckme:2deep'. With Sunrise desktop, I subscribe to my pluckme:1deep RSS feed, and set it to download links 1 deep. The Same goes for pluckme:2deep. Bam. Instant plucky goodness. I am going to look into finding a better plucker->RSS app, because sunrise desktop, while good, is going to be turning commercial soon.

I am doing 43 things.

43 Things is this interesting piece of social software, where you state your goals, and write your progress on each of your goals. Any kind of "goal intersection" that happens, i.e. when your goal matches up with someone else is displayed automagickally. This gives you the opportunity to build up a support system of people willing to help you reach whichever goal you desire.

It needs more integration. I want to see 43 things hooked up to my PDA. It also gives you the opportunity to post your 43 things into your blog, which is hella cool. And it does have RSS everywhere, as well as a REST API. Who knows, maybe I can write a palm conduit, to talk to the todo list!

It also allows you to tag your goals, and is a folksonomy. (other people can tag goals as well). I am not sure to what end however. Are these tags useful? Dunno.