Looking for input on AMO’s tagging plan

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I’m looking for some input on AMO’s tagging fundamentals, specifically regarding Unicode support. Read the whole post to see what the plan consists of so far and feel free to give feedback.

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Categories: general

4 responses

  1. Vin Turk

    Another addition might be an auto suggest while you type feature to help users make sure they spell tags correctly or find ones that are already being used (and keep control of the cloud dilution). Delicious implements something like this when adding tags to a bookmark (although they limit their auto-suggest to only tags that you have used).

  2. Nick Nguyen

    Hi Vin,

    Good call- we’ll put this in as a feature requirement (most likely will happen sometime after the initial release). It’s not quite like Delicious because there isn’t the notion of a user’s own “tagged items” that we can draw from for the autocomplete, nor are their copies of the same add-on that we can suggest from (like with bookmarks to the same URL in Delicious).

    FYI- I used to work on Delicious so I’m glad you drew from it for inspiration :)

    Nick

  3. Dan Borba

    I think the plans look sound. I might do a few things slightly differently but they would be mainly stylistic (IE: ‘_’ over ‘-’). Concerning unicode, I’d say it is simpler, and cleaner to stick with /[A-Za-z0-9-]/ – other characters simply get simplified to something in that set. While it does add a few conflicts (words that differ only by an accent in other languages for example,) I don’t feel the problem would be overwhelming. You could always test this by running the proposed simplification on a word list for several different languages (quite a few are available online) to verify the collision frequency (within themselves and across the different languages.)

    For dealing with cloud dilution, an interesting approach that I have seen is tag aliasing, or implications. Aliases would “hard-link” two tags, so that when searched they return each other results. These would be useful to unite tags in different languages referring to the same “concept”. As for implications, something like WebDev could be defined as implying, Web AND Development – so that searches for WebDev would return items tagged with WebDev as well as those tagged with both Web AND Development.

  4. l.m.orchard

    Delicious doesn’t limit to your tags.

    The “recommended” section on the posting form is the intersection of your most used tags with the community’s most used tags, while the “popular” section in suggestions are the tags popular from the community overall.