The "I get folksonomy" club

Yes and no...

For threads from before the changeover, that poster did "tag" their threads with the name of whatever forum they posted to. That is, the poster didn't do anything after the changeover, but it looks like there was an automatic conversion from forum to tag. (If it was posted in "original writing," it now shows as that poster tagging it as "original writing.")

From then on, they'd need to tag. Hopefully that's not too unlikely.

Using "original writing" was not a good example, in that case.

What I meant was a feature that would allow to surf a cluster of threads tagged by anyone with any kind of tag (like, for example, http://able2know.org/tag/human_rights/), and having them sorted by author.

'cause then, it wouldn't matter if it was the author who tagged the thread, or somebody else...

I see.

Yeah, that's different.

Thank you!

Hi all,

OK, I spent another two hours or so tagging. Got a bit distracted re-reading things, but not all that much.

What I tried to do was to create two tag-forums by using the Google site search to find topics on a) Zimbabwe and b) Sudan/Darfur, and tag the relevant ones accordingly.

The results were rather depressing - not a whole lot of threads, many that died quickly or just kinda underlined how little known even basic stuff about Africa is, and a couple of racist threads, from a white South-African/Rhodesian perspective or otherwise, that I refused to tag. And the longer Darfur threads invariably just ended up partisan slugfests about Bush, Iraq or the UN.

This is what I ended up with:

http://able2know.org/tag/zimbabwe/ (now 6 items)

http://able2know.org/tag/sudan/ (now 13 items)
http://able2know.org/tag/darfur/ (also 13 items, almost but not exactly identical i think)

I did a bunch of other Africa threads too, though, and so managed to beef up the human rights forum a little:

http://able2know.org/tag/human_rights/ (now 28 items)

Note that 7 of the Darfur/Sudan ones which I tagged had not shown up in the Google search; I only found them because I had posted an archive of links on one of the threads I did find. Just as a reminder that Google is a far from perfect means to search the site, even apart from not being able to search only one author's posts etc..

Good news for you nimh, I had more ideas on tags that render a individual tag limit moot. I'm putting it back at 10 now and we'll be implementing a better solution than the one I was on yesterday and won't need it.

Loving the tagging btw, I often find untagged threads, and by the time I tag them someone else has other good ones in. I'm also trying to refresh other good discussions that tags revive and start new ones that weren't well covered before.

I'm thinking "genocide" would make for a good tag to cluster a bunch of threads in, including many of the Darfur ones ... but I just didnt have enough tags to go there. "Africa, sudan, darfur, human rights" is already four, and there often was another one that I thought had to go in (eg "UN" or "United Nations", for the threads with endless discussion about what the UN could or could not do; "foreign policy" for the ones with much discussion about whether the US should intervene; "gender" or "rape" for the stories about mass rape...).

About those last ones, didnt really know how to tag: "rape", yes; but women's issues in general? As a tag, "women's rights" or issues etc is not accepted because of the apostrophe. "Gender", then? Seems so odd a tag for, you know, an article about mass rape in Darfur (or Bosnia, etc), but it'd be good to have one tag for everything related to women's rights and issues, and "women" obviously would not work (that'd pull in the whole Relationships forum thing).

(Oh ****, I promised 100 threads huh?)

Oy. I guess I'll go back and take out authors, after a break - that shouldn't be too hard, if I look at my tags.. I just finished the skim of the 65 pages, very much a skim.

More ominous, is that I didn't always add original writing. In the beginning I included it, along with prose or poetry if that applied - as some were about writing in general as a how-to thing - plus subject keywords (to me). Later, given I thought prose and poetry were already by now gaining some presence, if only for some time later, I skipped repeating the original writing phrase in My Tags.

Need I add that back?

Other tagging thoughts / things:

I just mentioned "foreign policy" as tag. Here it is:

http://able2know.org/tag/foreign_policy/

As you see, rather dominated by the African ones I just tagged. Also, those are overwhelmingly about "should America intervene" (in Sudan, Liberia..), which is thematically a rather narrow focus. So maybe if you come across relevant stuff about foreign policy (whether the US's, or the EU's, or Britain's etc) (and as opposed to about just international news stories in general, of course) -- keep this tag in mind? Thankee!

AIDS as tag:

http://able2know.org/tag/aids/

Just 4 items now. This is one I wanna expand up next, tomorrow if I have time.

International development, development aid, charity, the economical of developing countries, etc ... makes for a really interesting, and completely underlit, subject field. But I dunno about what tag is the best one. Here's three threads I tagged as "development aid":

http://able2know.org/tag/development_aid/

But then there was also a thread or two more about the (needed, lacking) development of African countries in more general terms, with aid only tangentially mentioned as part of the question/answer. Hmmm.

Finally, here's two that probably I will be the only one ever using in any kind of systematic way

http://able2know.org/tag/left-wing_politics/ (7 items)
http://able2know.org/tag/capitalism/ (8 items)

Cant speak for anyone else, but I wouldnt go back and edit / correct threads you'd already tagged... Unless of course you tagged them something wrong, but that's not what you're talking about.

If you forgot a tag, someone else will eventually add it. And if you put a maybe-less-than-optimal-but-not-incorrect one, what's the harm? With more tagging going on, it'll eventually drop out of the thread's top tags, and in the meantime it's not deceptive or anything...

I mean, that's just my take, and the only reason I think that is that it seems much more time-consuming per-tag to go back and edit individual tags, than just chugging on and tag whole new threads with a bunch of tags at a time.

If I understand how this works (ephemeral), I think I don't, that the tags will integrate, at least eventually.

Will someone straighten me out if I should add them?

We cross-posted, my personal reaction is now right above your post

Thanks, nimh..

Last night I thought I'd have some fun with this and go to the oldest topics under "my posts". I worked back to front from page 167 - discovered some fun old threads (including a few birthdays which I've started to tag by month). While I'm not very sophisticated with it, I have noticed that my tags are starting to make more sense (to me at least) - and the cross-referencing works nicely.

I've been doing "style" and "fashion" stuff. (Sometimes only one, sometimes both.) (Swimpy's "Project Runway" thread for example.)

Tagged bout 30 threads today... guess I'm going too slow cause I also look at the replies, whether they bring up any different stuff in detail..

Anyway, here's a new cluster - found these through using Google search, but that got lots and lots of results, so I guess I've only skimmed the surface:

http://able2know.org/tag/aids/ (16 items)
http://able2know.org/tag/hiv/ (12 items)

Nice, I've been following around and adding a few here and reinforcing your tags there.

Found another good author to tag:

http://able2know.org/user/JamesMorrison/topics/

That might find some crossover in the geopolitics tag I've been doing.

Here's a bunch that need more tags to make the top 5 relevant.

http://able2know.org/tag/tiwddhp/