#TAGSPACES CURRENT VERSION HOW TO#
#TAGSPACES CURRENT VERSION CODE#

#TAGSPACES CURRENT VERSION HOW TO#

But, please do understand this is not about me, it is about doing it right and coming together to refine it as we conduct an open alpha release to better understand how to do it best. A sort of wiktionary for tagging based around some commonly agreed upon principles. What I want to do with is create a place where people can talk about which tagspaces they use, how they use them, identify synonyms and create relationships between tags. If we plant a seed of intention, in the form of examples spread across the entire ‘tagging universe’ other people (even our grandparents) will be able to understand it and perhaps, start using it. So let’s not only teach people how to tag, let’s teach them how to search – this is the power of TagSpaces as I envision it. We should just embrace the chaos and accept that some people will tag things properly, some won’t, some will make typos, others will simply have another way of referencing the same thing. For some people their email address is the equivalent of a URL pointing to them so why not accept it and stop trying to force change on people who don’t want, or need to change. While they wont get the persistent identity benefits of a registered digital ID which I do think they would benefit from, an email address is plenty of identity for many people in the world and has been for over a decade. It also does not need to rely on people to have an iName. Identity could be a part of it, but it does not have to be. It need not work, it need not be called TagSpaces in the end, what is important is that we started the conversation with people who use tags to figure it out together. The pattern reads as seemingly normal text so I think a lot of people will get it, but that is what I want to find out. But we, the creators, need to let go of the idea of total control over users in an open wooly environment created by folksonomies rather than top down taxonomies.Īnother benefit to this approach is that it need not exist as a rel link on the page so people need not give Google Juice to technorati or anyone else – it can just be a string of text inside of your post, or in the keyword field, or in the rel tag area – almost like SMS shorthand (CUL8R), but for tags. As the world of Web 2.0 has shown us – get it out there in the hands of the users and see what they do with it – engage with real people to understand their needs and adjust your solution to meet them. Or we could form a steering committee, talk about it for a few months, argue with each other, fight over our egos, hold on to the old way of things and do nothing that advances our cause while investing our energy in mental gymnastics.

After all the tags are simple, readable, understandable AND parseable by machine. All I am asking of you my dear friend, is to consider the idea, contribute your thoughts to the process via our Wiki and if it feels good to you, start using this loose format for tagging posts, photos, podcasts or whatever else – then share with us which tags you are using and under what conditions and we will probably figure this out together pretty easily.

All people need to do is start using the format and try to figure out what works best for them.

#TAGSPACES CURRENT VERSION CODE#

The beauty of this is people can use it now without any code deployment on the part of anyone and existing search technologies can understand it to produce better results today. Some other examples of tagspaces might be: I actually first blogged about this last week in regards to how I was going to use tagspaces for BrainJams so people with different levels of interest regarding the event, the planning and the content could follow what was important to them more easily (i.e. In a sense, it is a human powered, open subsidy for search technology as well as tagging technology – but that is not important, what is important is that we can collectively improve search with a very minor modification to our current behaviour. In my view, tagspaces are the glue between people identifying something and those seeking it out – the tag agreed upon by a particular community of users for how to desribe something, provide it context and perhaps even include the ID/reputation of the tagger. For the past several weeks I have been thinking a lot about tagspaces and have organized these thoughts at as an open proposal as a new way to think about tagging that does not require the rel tag, new technologies or drastic changes in human behaviour (though it still requires us to evangelize tagging of course).

Tagspaces current version