Tagged Journal Proposal

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 8:26 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> | Proposal (off the cuff, please poke holes in this): We might beef up
> | the HIG in the area of tagging, and even suggest a set of canonical
> | tags for various types of content. (Localized, of course.)  Combining
> | this with Scott's "path-tags", we might introduce Images/, Videos/,
> | Documents/, and Audio/ tags in such a way that we get the best of both
> | worlds.  The system can "automatically" file things away in a
> | reasonable subdirectory of the Journal, but the kids can always find
> | *anything* they've done, in chronological order, by looking in the
> | Journal itself (before selecting one of these path-tags as a query).
>
> Please don't conflate a good idea with a bad one.  Activities providing
> localized metadata (both tags and key:value pairs) automatically could be
> a very good thing.  Even better would be internationalization: if
> Activities use specific machine-readable words, then when objects are
> passed around, those words can be localized for each user's Journal.
>
> This is completely independent from the "path tags", which would be useful
> only when trying to maintain compatibility with non-Journal filesystems,
> and are tremendously confusing otherwise.

Heh, Ben doesn't like path tags, it looks like. ;-)

As far as I'm concerned, whether it's "Images/" or "Images" is a tiny
implementation detail; I don't care much either way.  But I'm not
convinced that "Images" and "Video" etc are useful tags to add; both
of these are already available via the "What" searches (ie, implicit
in mime-type info).  Someone mentioned that facebook adds magic image
tags based on *recognizing the faces of your friends* -- that seems
like a much better working example.  If Record can automatically add a
"Tom" tag to my pictures of Tom, that would *rock*.
  --scott


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