Solving Tag Pollution 8 June 2008

Taxonomy has a big advantage over folksonomy, it’s immutable and therefore prone to fewer errors. But folksonomy has a big advantage over taxonomy, it’s personal and flexible and therefore has context for the user. This is an attempt to mate the two systems producing an offspring with the best genes of each.

Contextualizing Tags
If we analyze the tags associated with a piece of content we can start to categorize them depending on their context. By breaking things down to Global, Personal and System Tags we can make sure that only the tags relevant to a particular context get used in that context.

Global Tags
By setting a threshold for the number of people who have tagged something with a word or phrase before it can enter the global tag pool, we get an automatic system for filtering out errors and Personal Tags. In the diagram below, two people have to tag the item with the same phrase in order for it to enter the global pool. Brian’s typo tag [2.0] doesn’t make the pool thereby reducing pollution.

Personal Tags
If only one person has used a particular tag for a piece of content, chances are that it is either an error, or that tag is personal to that person. In the diagram, you can see that John has tagged the photo with “my birthday” [1.0]. If Laura wanted to search for photos of her birthday, she wouldn’t want John’s photo to show up, the tag is only relevant to John. And when John searches for “my birthday” the photo will show up.

System Tags
System Tags aren’t subject to the same threshold as tags entered by users as they should be automatically added by back-end processes. In the diagram, the system is tagging the photo with the date and camera model from the picture’s EXIF data. Automatic system tagging can also be tied to front end semantics; if a user uploads a document to an online Project Management application, the context in which the user hits the upload button (say, inside client->projectname) can be used to determine the system tags.

Bonus: Admin tags
If your system has trusted admin users, when these people tag something it should behave in the same way as system tags – with no threshold.

tag pollution diagram

tags{ folksonomy | pollution | tagging | tags | taxonomy | tag }

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Seashore - open source OS X image editor 21 August 2006

I recently clean re-installed OS X on my creaky old first generation TiBook and have since been on a mini mission to restock the applications folder using open source alternatives to the professional apps on my other Mac. The main benefit to this is that open source apps are so often considerably less resource hungry than their pro counterparts, meaning that the laptop that seemed to be beyond it’s life span is actually still perfectly usable.

Today I discovered Seashore, an open source, Cocoa, OS X image editor based around the GIMP’s technology and using the same native file format (nice for open portability). Despite its early version number it seems like a really nice stable image editor. Give it a go.

Oh, and while I’m here, here’s four other incredibly useful, awesome, freeware apps to try which all fall in to the category “Light years ahead of anything on Windows”. And they’re free.

Paparazzi! – screengrab an entire webpage as rendered in Safari in one shot.
ImageWell – so useful it hurts.
QuickSilver – I can’t even begin to describe how useful/awesome this is.
VitaminSEE – superfast image viewer.

tags{ apps | freeware | osx | software | wevah }

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Patrick O'Brien foundation 13 June 2006

Even if you’ve never come across the work of Patrick O’Brien through transfatty.com please take some time to read the story over at patrickobrienfoundation.org and maybe donate some money towards a worthy cause.

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Tagging email 10 April 2006

The disorganised nature of email has been bugging me a little recently and even more so the poor tools we currently have at our disposal to try to organise it ourselves. Sure, smart folders in Apple’s Mail.app and labels in Thunderbird go a tiny way to helping but neither of these actually solves the core issue as I see it.

Scenario 1: Suppose I have a 20 message conversation about fixing a bug, midway through that conversation the focus of what bug is being worked on, what file is being worked on or even what project is being worked on takes a shift, all of a sudden the search and organise features available to me don’t cut it as they’re now infected with meta-noise.
Scenario 2: suppose I get sent some important information but the sender has misspelled the key word that I would search for, unless I create rules for my smart folders that look for all the possible misspellings or somehow remember the incorrect spelling, I’m likely to never find that email again.

So, the obvious solution here is a tagging system. In Scenario 1 above, I could tag the emails in the second half of the conversation with what the conversation had actually become about. In Scenario 2 I could tag the message with the correct spelling of the important word.

Anyway, a little bit of googling and I’ve found MailTags for Apple’s Mail.app which I’m going to try out tonight although it doesn’t quite solve the issue fully as far as I can tell because all the meta data is stored locally, which means when I’m on a different machine all my tags are missing.

There’s a propsal for a tags feature in Thunderbird 2 but sadly it seems to miss the point in my opinion.

There’s TagTheBird which currently gets immediately discounted due to the fact that it sends all your email to their servers in plain text and only lets you auto tag, no way to enter your own tags as far as I can work out. I really don’t want all my email sent off to somebody else’s server.

Which brings me to the musings of Alan Gutierrez who has obviously been having the same problems as me organizing his mail. His proposed Thunderbird extension would store the user’s tags in one or multiple x-tag headers in the email itself making the meta data portable. This would also mean I could search the same meta data on my Windows PC at work and my Mac at home. So here’s hoping that someone picks up Alan’s proposal.

tags{ email | tags }

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When interface design attacks 15 March 2006

Office 12 UI

A friend pointed me in the direction of this blog entry as a demonstration that Microsoft’s UI designers are moving in the right direction. To a point I agree, it certainly looks nicer than Windows FP even if we ignore the worrying similarities to a deviantArt hax0r’s Mac skin for Windows. What’s actually bothering me here though is the usability. This interface uses what I call “secret tabs”, notice the titles of the un-selected tabs just floating in mid air with no indication as to what they actually are. You don’t know that’s a tab until you click on it, by which time it’s too late. It might turn out to be the “erase my harddrive” button, or a goatse hyperlink.
Considering all the freely available resource material on how to make an application GUI work for the user, this is well slack.

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