Monday, February 07, 2005

Now this is starting to make more sense... Tag Stemming

Matt Biddulph is providing a very useful example and, for me, a way that tagging starts making sense from a 'second wave' perspective. Thanks, Matt. I'm putting most of his post hackdiary: Stemming tags, and one website to the tune of another here because of it's usefulness not only of an idea, but of how to communicate that idea.
Here are two toys I've made recently: a tag stemming tool that helps you tidy up your tagging using the Porter algorithm, and a (Flash) screen-recorded demo of del.icio.us seamlessly embedded in the BBC Radio 3 website.

So, what are you seeing in this movie? It's nothing more than a bit of DHTML trickery that imports a subset of del.icio.us functionality into an existing website. I chose BBC Radio 3 because it has a wealth of content with plenty of potential for horizontal navigation, and because it has a clearly-defined canonical URL per programme and thereby gains the maximum benefit from being tagged. By creating a symbiotic relationship between the two sites in your browser, you gain an overlaid cross-site navigation that doesn't exist in the site as it currently stands, and del.icio.us users see from your tagging of Radio 3 pages in the wider context.

There are several things that I enjoy in this demo. In no particular order:

* I like the immediate feedback that you can get from adding a tag to a programme. Decide that 'cello' is relevant, and within seconds you see a bunch of other cello programmes. It's common for content management systems to demand 'metadata' or 'keywords' of you when you file content, but rare that there's an easy way to get a feel for what value you've added by doing so.
* This was my first real attempt to wrangle the XMLHTTPRequest system, and it was a satisfying one. I did learn one or two things, including some problems with asynchronous and synchronous modes of operation.
* Looking beyond the specific application (tagging) used here, notice the two-way benefit that came from the mashup of one site's service with another's content. I like the idea that domain-specific use on Radio 3 leads to general usefulness on del.icio.us.

There are many more possibilities to explore. The demo uses a single user on del.icio.us for all tagging. Imagine instead being able to select between different tag sets to overlay - one to guide newcomers to classical music, another designed for experts and old hands, a third to explore the history of a particular instrument or musical movement."


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