The "I get folksonomy" club

I'm a personality cult man myself. In my experience, the chances that I find posts interesting correlate much more strongly with their posters than with the topic they post about. So what I've been doing is go through my favorite posters' threads and tag their threads with whatever keywords came to my mind.

I've mostly been tagging my own topics, starting with the recent ones, the ones that got the most votes so far and the most viewed ones. I tag the threads I participate in or want to keep an eye on, of course, and I've tagged a bunch of tags started by people I respect, whose threads I'd like to be prominent.

So not much in the way of systematically ordering by subject, bar for a couple of minor exceptions, I'm afraid. I do try to be consistent in my tagging (always use the same tags for the same subjects), of course.

Is this the kind of answer you were looking for / thinking of, or did you have something more specific or directed in mind?

Well, I'm tagging my own topics, a little matter that may take forever even though I'm skipping some. I'll get speedier at it. I tag some others' topics to follow, and others that post on my old threads about architecture, art, and other matters. I figure I'll be tagging as a new hobby seeing where it leads me with connections. Hmm, art + politics.. it could be a long term hobby.

Simple question -
a lot of my threads are on the old food and drink forum. For myself I'm starting to tag them either food or drink, but I question my wisdom. I like the distinction for me, but will anyone who clicks on Food and Drink see them?

I'm interested in interesting clusters of topics you may have tagged, or ones you think may need more topics.

For example, I was working through Latin American topics and tagged a thread about Che, and if you know any other good ones it'd keep it going.

http://able2know.org/tag/che_guavara/

Would it be possible to spell it "Che Guevara", maybe possibly?

<grins>

Sure, there ya go, already made one better.

Edit: Just saw someone added BBB's topic. Nice. http://able2know.org/tag/che_guevara/

Some good ones I've found are:

http://able2know.org/tag/architecture/
http://able2know.org/tag/media/

Tagging the best ones in there will make them move toward the top in the default view.

Also note that abuse is best curbed if you enter a couple tags (when appropriate). Right now, if anyone tags something "politics" it shows up on that page. Shortly it will change to only doing so if it's one of the top 3 tags (the number will change, the more tags taken into consideration the more volume is needed to prevent the vandalism).

Doing that (e.g. "politics", "obama", "iraq" for a thread about Obama's positions on Iraq) will help the related tags make more sense and prevent the vandalism (e.g. "full of penises" tag and other intentional miscategorization being done by some of the people arguing that it won't work and trying to make themselves right).

I did tag a whole bunch of threads with "elections". I also used "campaigns" a lot, the wisdom of which I am now no longer sure.

NB I posted this on the A2K bugs thread already, but it looks like suddenly you can only add 5 tags to a topic anymore, rather than 10 as before. Not a good idea IMO ... and kinda gets in the way of a systematic tagging effort. (You dont wanna go through a whole bunch of threads to add 5 tags and then go back to add another 5 once this is fixed (if a bug is what it is).)

I also serially used the tag "human rights" - makes for a nice list actually, even if it's still relatively short (11 items):

http://able2know.org/tag/human_rights/

I've also used "terrorism", which is the tag to 14 topics now (I did 9) - could become a good one with more input:

http://able2know.org/tag/terrorism/

I'll be adding a lot more threads, mine and other people's, to architecture and a lot of land use stuff and a lot of art in various subcomponents, as I go along.

Nice, I just browsed your tagged threads and found some I liked.

Meanwhile, I found my first tagging dilemma:

http://able2know.org/tag/soccer/ or http://able2know.org/tag/football/

I'll have to let the crowd decide where a topic like this one goes.

Sorry, that link goes only to the threads I have tagged with "elections" (37 of 'em, as it turns out).

This should have been the link, showing all threads tagged with elections (total: 47):

http://able2know.org/tag/elections/

Why not both? When in doubt between tags, I've so far just used both of them - reasoning that new visitors will also be looking for the subject in both threads. Eg, Americans will be looking for the tag "soccer", visitors from the rest of the world will be looking for the tag "football", doesnt that make it necessary to tag a thread like that with both words?

(Correct me if I'm wrong!)

This is not a bug, this is intentional tweaking. Let me explain.

Right now, we if anyone tags something politics it will show up in the politics grid. Now with the default sort (most tagged that tag) it won't be prominent and the most "relevant" (as defined by most tagged that way) threads would be most prominent.

But for the users using the "new posts" sort (and truly any other sort than most tagged) this means any vandal can put in miscategorized topics. So we are going to address this by requiring higher thresholds before tags are used.

So the idea is to focus the tags a bit, with enough scale none of this would matter but at this scale we need to make some tweaks to prevent the abuse we are seeing.

It may go up later, but I need to tighten the semantic focus of the tags a bit, and one of the things we are trying is fewer tags. So an additional change that's coming is that the topic would only appear in the public tag page if it's one of the top 3 tags for the topic.

I actually did both as well for soccer threads. I "stem" my tags a lot and try to get in the different variations that I think would be common.

I guess if people want no soccer threads they can use a more specific tag like "american football". With enough use the related tags algorithm will relate them anyway.

Robert, it would help me, especially if tags end up being a relatively short number as nimh worries per one's tag, if you answer this -



This affects more than food and drink --
Once I connect garden design with landscape architecture and architecture, I won't have much room left if I have to have Pets and Garden as a starter.. before I add 'garden'.

The related tags features will pull them all together, and the related topics feature that's coming will make it even less important.

Those initial tags are the most popular because of the history of topics on the old forums, and how we couldn't separate them on import (or even tag them pets, garden because that doesn't make any sense for a gardening thread).

Over time that kind of thing should fix itself, and what I prefer to do is to use the best, most semantic tags I can. So I'd tag a gardening thread in "pets and garden" something like "gardening, garden" and the system will learn from it and you'll see that pets and garden each become a highly related tag to the "pets and garden" tag we started with.

So don't worry about the popularity of the tag, just go for the best semantic uses.

Thanks, that's what I was hoping.

Also, I caught your last post before the one about popular tags, that helps too.

Thanks for the explanation, but me really, really no like!!

That human rights forum, for example, that I just linked in, with 11 threads I already put in - it wouldnt exist with just 5 tags per thread. Cause whether it's state terror in Chechnya or torture in Guantanamo or political prisoners in Tbet, you'd first add the name of the countries involved (Chechnya+Russia; China+Tibet); the name of the continent, as well as "International news" (to keep the old forums running as basic categories, which in this case are actual useful ones) -- that's four already, not mentioning, say, extremism, terrorism, fundamentalism, history, "former soviet union", communism or the name of the famous person in the story (Basayev, Dalai Lama, whoever)...

I mean if one of the biggest advantages of tagging is the many ways in which you can find a relevant item back depending on your "entry point" of interest, then a 5-tag limit is ... a serious limit. At least if I look at the threads I've been tagging. At least as long as not too many people are doing too much tagging..

Maybe if 10 is too much, can it please be somewhere between 6-8? So that you can add more than the countries, continent and main thematic forum involved? Please, please, please?

I promise I'll tag 100 extra threads if you do...

*looks sweetly innocent and pleading*