tagging – Climb to the Stars

Becoming a Professional Networker: Tags in Address Book OSX Needed! [en]

[fr] Besoin, de toute urgence: plugin Address Book.app permettant de taguer ses contacts.

For some time now, I’ve been aware that I’m becoming a professional networker. Almost all I do to promote Going Solo, for example, relies on my reputation and the connections I have to other people.

Now, I’ve never been somebody to collect contacts just for the sake of collecting contacts, but until LeWeb3 last year, I had just been content with butterflying around and stacking business cards somewhere near by desk. At LeWeb3, when I started telling people about Going Solo, I also started realising that the people I met and contacts I made were going to have more importance for my business than before.

And if I’ve learnt something during these last two months, it’s the importance of getting back to people. I’ve figured out how iGTD and GMail can play nice together to help me with that, but it’s not sufficient. I need to keep track of who I’ve asked what, of who can help me with what, who has this or that connection. And yes, I have too many people in my business network to keep everything in my head.

As I explain in the video above, the lovely Cathy Brooks put me on the right track: use Address Book.app. I don’t really need to keep all the contact details related to a person close at hand (ie, phone number, e-mail, etc.) because I have that in LinkedIn, Facebook, GMail address book, or on business cards. I’m not interested in keeping an exhaustive repository of all the contact details of all the people I’ve met. What I’m interested in, however, is keeping the names of these people somewhere I can attach meaningful information to them.

Where we met. What we talked about. Stuff that’ll help me remember who people are.

So, I started simply adding names (Firstname Lastname) into my OSX address book, along with a few words in the Notes field. The nice thing about the Notes field is that you don’t have to toggle edit mode on to add stuff in the Notes. So, of course, I started using the notes field to tag people. Not too bad (smart folders allow me to “pull out” people with a certain tag) but not great either, because tags get mixed up with notes, and it’s a bit clunky.

Somebody suggested I create a custom “Tags” field (a “Names” type field is fine). Unfortunately, though this looks like a good idea at first, it fails because you have to edit a contact each time you want to add tags. Also, you can’t create a smart folder based on the contents of that field — you need to search through the whole card. Clunky too.

I don’t know how to write Address Book plugins, but I know they exist, and I have an idea for a plugin that would save my life (and probably countless others) and which doesn’t seem very complex to build. If there’s anybody out there listening… here’s a chance to be a hero.

I want a “tag your contacts” plugin for Address Book.app. What would it do? Simple, add a “Tags” field that behaves similarly to the “Notes” field. That would allow me to separate notes and tags — they aren’t quite the same thing, don’t you agree?

In addition to that, the plugin could display a list of all contacts tagged “thisorthat” when you double-clicked the tag. That would be nice.

Does anybody else want this? Does it already exist? Would anybody be willing to build it? (If other people are interested, I’d be willing to suggest we pool some cash to donate to the kind person building this life-saving plugin.)

Hashtags For My Followees [en]

[fr] En utilisant un dièze # devant un mot dans un message Twitter, on en fait un tag (un "hashtag", pour être précis -- "hash" étant un nom du dièze). Le site hashtags.org indexe ces tags. Pour y retrouver vos tweets, suivez hashtags sur Twitter.

Hashtags.org popped up on my radar roughly a week ago, I’d say. I mentioned hashtags once already here. They’re a “user-generated” system for implementing tags into Twitter. (User-generated, here, does not mean the same as in the ugly “user-generated content (UCG)” everybody is talking about these days, but points to the fact that hashtags were initiated by users, not by the Twitter-makers — just like the @convention.)

So, what does hashtags.org do? Basically, it makes those hashtags visible. In September, Twitter introduced tracking, which I realise now I haven’t mentioned here yet. Tracking allows you to “subscribe” to keywords. I personally chose to track “stephtara” and “@stephtara” so that any @replies would arrive directly on my phone as texts. I had the bad idea to track “fowa” during the Future of Web Apps conference. By break time I had 300 text messages in my inbox. Oopsie!

Hashtags.org allows you to view tweets labeled with a hashtag on a web page. Look at #leweb3 for example, #twitter, or #wordpress.

A few remarks:

it’s not very populated yet, because you need to follow @hashtags for them to track your tags; as of writing, only 132 people are — so start following!
I’m getting 500 internal server errors when I try to look at a tag that doesn’t exist (#lausanne, as of writing)
once “everybody” starts using hashtags, it will be very useful to be able to narrow down a collection of tagged tweets to “my followees only”; imagine I’m at LeWeb3, and everybody is twittering about it: I’m not interested in getting the thousands of tweets, just those from the people I’m following
for a long time, I’ve been a proponent of stickemtogether multi-word tags; recently, I’ve revised my ideas about them and come to realise that multi-word tags really need spaces in them, for better indexing; at the moment, you need to use “+” instead of spaces, like “#san+francisco” (unfortunately these don’t get indexed correctly, another 500 error); Stowe suggests opening and closing hash as an alternative, which is a bit hashy though it has its charm (“#san francisco#”).

In any case, nice to see such an initiative up and running!

FOWA: Putting Users First (Thomas Vander Wal) [en]

Here are my live notes of this Future of Web Apps (FOWA) session. They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. Suw also blogged this one.

Throw out the “user”: used to be a good term to help us think of the people using our system… but somewhere along the line, the user became the annoying person for the developers, lost its empathy.

Focus on people. Real people doing real things. Me. All the stuff that has to do with my life, connecting all the bits. My information.

Real people… means we have to start thinking about their desires, wants, needs. This is really important for people who are building, designing, developing… even using these systems.

If we don’t think about their wants and needs, that’s when they start sending nasty e-mails or complaining on their blogs or facebook.

Real people includes the 95% of people who don’t live their life on the web. (Not us in the room, that is.) Think outside of the alpha/beta users. People need the information in their real life, out of the browser. Real needs there.

Tech pains:

syncing (no comment)
refindability: remember that time where you were trying to find something you knew was there?
taste: better agree with the editor of Mahalo on what a “cake” is
identity: “I gave the internet my details, why do I have to do it again?”
easy of use
portability
privacy: smart privacy
attention: we only have so much attention… we’re going the same stupid things over and over again (sorting junk out of the mail)

Lots of problems that tools today can address. What we should be doing is easing tech pain.

Tagging and other features.

Work contributing vs. derived value.

Tagging takes a bit of work but it puts your world of information in your context. Ratings require roughly as much work but don’t derive as much value.

Tagging brings up the “F” word: “Folksonomy”. Coined by Thomas in 2004: looking at Flickr and del.icio.us. It’s not a taxonomy… it’s regular people calling things the way they usually call them.

Folksonomy solves the problem of retrieval. I tagged it, so I can refind it. It’s also usually done in a social environment, so that opens it to others. Personal and shared folksonomies. The act of tagging is done by the person who is actually consuming the information. I put something of my identity in my tags.

Three bits: object being tagged, metadata or tag, person doing the tagging.

Identity linked to object by interest. Identity linked to metadata by vocabulary. Object to metadata by definition. A community of those using the same term to tag the same object emerges. Community linked to metadata by terminology. Community linked to object by culture.

This allows us to find more objects. Find somebody else who has tagged stuff “audi”, subtract what I’ve tagged “audi” from their stuff tagged “audi”, and that gives me five new things! Smart system.

Social bookmarking gets (more) social. Ma.gnolia has groups. Nice feature: giving thanks. Just a click to say thanks for something nice you found through somebody else.

Private groups; top tags; recent bookmarks; discussions; members.

Sharing and being social is how humans have got out of caves, and how we advance as a society.

Getting to real relationships: lots of tools have a “broadmind friend” concept of relationships (“you’re my friend, therefore I’m interested in everything you are.”)

Spheres of Sociality: personal, selective (many), collective (all people on the service), mob. steph-note: I got a “mob” feeling when I tracked “FOWA” on Flickr.

Directional sociality: real relationships are not equal. They can be unidirectional. Unequal access. People might have access to read our blog, read and comment, read and also read private feeds.

steph-note: this is exactly what I mean when I say we need a way to structure our social networks

We don’t want to be listening to everything from everybody. And we need to be able to do something with the information. Frustration with Facebook and also, to a lesser extent, with Twitter.

Ease of use: needs to be as simple as ripping off a phone number from an ad stuck on a lamp post. The information is portable. Our web services need to be this easy. Good example: Stikkit. Identifies that this thing I’m saving is a date/calendar thing. steph-note: like Tumblr recognises that I’m posting a quote

Test early, test often, and test with real people. We’re not necessarily our own best audience.

Tag-Related Wishlist [en]

[fr] Mes idées/prédictions/désirs pour l'évolution des tags et des technologies associées.

I told you my mind never stops spinning, didn’t I? Here are a few follow-up thoughts on my previous post on tags. View this as my brain dump of what I’d like tags to do in WordPress and around.

Bear in mind that I haven’t tried 2.3 yet, don’t know exactly what it does and doesn’t do, and haven’t done much homework. So (hopefully!) some of the stuff I’m speaking about here already exists. If it’s the case, please leave a note with a pointer in the comments.

Some of the stuff here might also be stupid. If it is, please tell me.

I don’t think all this should necessarily be in the WordPress core. Plugin makers, feel free to delve in here for inspiration. If I like your plugin, I’ll plug it.

Links Between Tagspaces

So, based on what I’ve understood, WP2.3 will provide a local tagspace. This means that if I tag a post “cat”, the link on that tag will take me to something like myblog.com/tags/cat. That’s cool.

But I want more.

I want the myblog.com/tags/cat page to contain configurable pointers to other tagspaces. For example, my Flickr photos tagged “cat”. My del.icio.us links. My videos. The Technorati tagspace.

See what I mean?

Somewhere, WordPress would ask me “What other tagspaces would you like links to?” and I’d enter “http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/tags/”, “http://del.icio.us/steph/”, “http://www.viddler.com/explore/steph/tags/”, “http://technorati.com/tag/” in some pretty form (we know how to do those now, don’t we?)

Alternate Tagspaces

Some people may not want to use the local tagspace. Hell, most people who tag their posts right now point to the Technorati tagspace. An option to do so could be nice.

Tag Combinations

I’d like my local WordPress tagspace to allow tag combinations. This is the stuff I wrote about nearly 3 years ago. Del.icio.us does it: here are my links tagged “books” AND “read”.

We need more of this, particularly if we start thinking multilingual. I want to be able to point to a page containing posts I tagged “adolescents” OR “teenagers” OR “ados” or “teens”. I use all those, but I’m sure (given the nature of tagging) some posts have slipped through the cracks and have only one or two of these tags.

Less multilingual, maybe I just want to have “cats” or “cat” (sometimes I use plural, sometimes singular, and the distinction isn’t important to me in this context).

Related Tags

Del.icio.us does this. My local tagspace pages should have this feature too.

And how about an option to be able to see (in a click) posts tagged “cat” AND all the posts tagged with one of the related tags? (This could become a bit unwieldy though.)

Tag Management

The “obvious” stuff. Rename tag “stephaniebooth” to “Stephanie Booth” everywhere it is. (Flickr does this well.) Merge tags. Add a bunch of tags to all the selected posts (result of a search or by-category selection). Remove tag X from all posts which are tagged Y.

This is the kind of stuff I wanted to make possible for categories when I wrote Batch Categories, a lifetime ago. I haven’t touched this “hack” for years now, and I’ve heard conflicting information about its compatibility with recent WordPress versions. I think somebody somewhere updated it for WP2.x — if you search you might find it.

Public Tagging

Now, this would be a source of tag spam, unless it’s for example limited to registered users of the blog, or people identified by OpenID or on a “trust list” (e.g. people who have commented on the blog before). I’ve encouraged people to open up tagging to the community on Flickr, and the feedback from those who have done it has been great. I’d like a way to do this for my blog posts, too.

I’m sure structured portable social networks have a part to play here.

More Importing/Conversion

Ages ago, I added keywords to my blog posts. (I now know it’s not very useful — maybe even, not at all.) Around the same time, I used Topic Exchange Channels for some of my posts, making the ITE channel visible on the post by adding a link to it (gosh, come to think of it — I hadn’t heard of tags yet, but what I was doing was some form of proto-tagging… quite impressed with myself!)

Anyway, leaving the self-congratulatory stuff aside, my wp_postmeta table contains old information about posts which has long since disappeared from this blog, but which is still there, ready to be recycled. I could turn those old keywords and ITE channels into tags with an importer.

So, how about a very “customizable” importer? I would give the meta field name I want to convert to tags, and indicate if the tag data is comma-separated, space-separated, or simply placed in multiple fields.

(For my old keywords, there is one meta field called “keywords” which contains a comma-separated list of words, whereas for the ITE channels there is one entry per channel called “ite_topic” (IIRC) with a unique word as a value — but there can be more than one channel per post.)

So, “manual importer”, anybody?

That’s All, Folks!

There, I think I’ve told you what was on my mind. Feedback welcome. And plugins. Code. Solutions.

WordPress Finally Has Tags! [en]

[fr] Après des années d'errance, WordPress implémente enfin un système de tags qui ne sont pas des catégories. Un billet un peu plus complet en français s'impose probablement. Qu'en pensez-vous?

I’ve known for some time that version 2.3 of WordPress would support real tagging. Today, Matt has just announced the deployment of tagging on WordPress.com.

From the start, I’ve been a very vocal supporter of the differentiation between tags and categories — and I really appreciate Matt acknowledging this in his announcement.

When I first met Matt offline for the first time nearly a year ago, at Blogtalk Reloaded in Vienna, I jumped on the occasion to pester him about tags and categories. He listened — but I don’t think he was convinced at the time.

A few months later, I was in San Francisco — and one of the first things Matt told me when we met again was “you know, I finally saw the light about tags and categories”. He told me version 2.3 would have both. I was overjoyed. I’ll never know exactly what role I played in Matt’s “seeing the light”, but I like to think I contributed 🙂

Looking back in time, Technorati started indexing tags in January 2005. They weren’t new for me then (I’d been tagging things on del.icio.us since May 2004 and on Flickr since October of the same year) but clearly, being able to tag posts was a great thing. You know me — my brain can’t sit still — two days later, I was rambling about some ways to combine tags in searches/sorting. Some of the stuff I talk about in there isn’t possible yet, but I hope it will someday.

Two days after that, I wrote my first WordPress plugin, Bunny’s Technorati Tags — which became quite popular and which I still use to this day.

I’m really glad to be able to retire this plugin, specially as Peter Westwood has written an importer for it. That means you should have no problems converting your bunny-tags into wp-tags. Thank you very much, Peter.

Bear with me while I dig though my archives: weighted tags by category is something I’d forgotten I’d wanted… does anything like that exist now?

My only gripe with the implementation of tags in WordPress, for the moment, is that they will be comma-separated. No! Please! We’ve been typing space-separated tags into Flickr and del.icio.us for three years now. Three years! When I chose space-separation for the tags in my plugin, it was because the existing interfaces for tags did it like that.

Spaces, please. Or at least an option to input them space-separated. Or a simple plugin. Tags separated by spaces, and multi-word tags between quotes.

Twitter Hashtags: A Quickie [en]

[fr] On commence à ajouter des tags aux messages Twitter. Comme la place est limitée, le tag est souvent incorporé au message. Attention donc à ne pas sortir les tags du message lors de l'implémentation de cette fonctionnalité dans vos outils.

Steven Hodson has questions about hashtags in Twitter (via Stowe). He also talks of possible support for these in TwitBox:

And yes I am asking this for some purely selfish reasons as I am thinking about adding experimental support for this idea to TwitBox so I would definitely be interested in some feedback on this.

Steven Hodson, A question for Twitter users out there

(For reference, hashtags is a proposal for Twitter tag channels by Chris Messina. It is still not the contact tagging I’ve been asking for — but I hear the Twitter boys are working on that.)

A quickie, that I’ve been thinking about: as space is limited in twitter messages, I’ve noticed a tendency to just insert a hash in the message in front of a relevant word, if the tag one wanted to use was already part of the message. Example:

Writing a message about using #hashtags on #twitter. #tagging

In this case, I saved space by using the hash inside my sentence, and not repeating the tags “hashtags” and “twitter” alongside “tagging”.

So one important thing would be to not remove the tag from the message when putting it in a channel. Otherwise we could end up with things like this in the channel #twitter:

Writing a message about using on. (tags: hashtags, twitter, tagging)

See how bad this would be?

Incorporating metadata in the message “body” itself is nothing really new (microformats!) but here there is an extra incentive to do it: space is limited. Keep that in mind when implementing hashtags for Twitter or other presence tools.

Update: Old, but still relevant. Some thoughts about tagging, tags, and tag combinations written in 2005, just after Technorati started indexing tags.

Flickr: Open Up Tagging Your Photos to the Community, Please [en]

[fr] Permettez à tous les membres de Flickr de taguer vos photos. Moins de travail pour vous et de meilleurs tags pour vos photos!

Tagging one’s photos precisely on Flickr can be a bit of a drag, especially when you upload over 200 conference photographs full of people you don’t necessarily know. Personally, I go through my photos once before uploading them, and the last thing I want to do when I’ve uploaded them is go through them again to add tags.

However, I find myself looking at other people’s photos with interest, and it doesn’t take much effort to quickly add a tag or a name while I’m doing that.

Unfortunately, many Flickr users open up tagging only to their contacts (the default, IIRC). My account was like that for a long time. When I met Derek Powazek in Lausanne, he told me he had opened up tagging to everybody on Flickr, and that people really participated. I decided to try, and it works. And you do retain control in case somebody does something stupid (happened to me… maybe once?)

(I could show you pages and pages and pages like that for my Reboot photos.)

So, please, do us a favour (and do me a favour, if you’re taking photographs of me and not tagging them stephaniebooth).

Go to your Photo Privacy Preferences page (this link will take you there if you’re already logged in to Flickr) and make sure it looks something like this:

Then, add tags like needstags or needsnames to encourage people to help out. And pass the word around to your friends…

Thanks!

Update, Friday 21st

I just realised this is not retroactive. So it only applies to the new photos you upload. If you want to change those permissions on your previously uploaded photos (which I recommend!), you need to go through the organiser. I’m not sure there is a way to do them all in one go.

Google Reader Share Limitations [en]

[fr] J'ai peur que mon amour pour la fonction "share" de Google Reader ne soit en train d'appauvrir l'ajout de liens à mon compte del.icio.us.

I told you I liked the sharing feature of Google Reader. After a week or so using it, I worry that I’m “sharing” stuff instead of putting it in del.icio.us. It’s not a problem per se, but it is because I can’t search my shared items.

Wishlist: I’d love a “del.icio.us” button next to the “share” one in gReader. Of course, I’m dreaming, as del.icio.us is Yahoo.

Edit: by the way, thanks to the people who use the add to del.icio.us feedflare to help me add their posts to del.icio.us. It’s really useful.

Hack: Make Bunny Tags Point to Your Blog Tagspace [en]

[fr] Un petit bidouillage pour que mon plugin wordpress pour ajouter des tags ne montre (dans Technorati) que les billets de votre propre blog.

Here’s a quick hack for all of you who, like Fabienne, are disappointed that my Bunny’s Technorati Tags plugin points to the technorati tagspace instead of just your own posts.

For it to work, your plugin files need to be writable (how to do this is beyond the scope of this post, but try looking for a way to chmod 777 or whatever in your FTP program; if you use the command line, then chmod -R 777 wp-content/plugins should do it). Then, open the plugin editor (WP admin screen > Plugins > Plugin Editor) and edit the file for Bunny’s Technorati Tags.

Look for this code:

 $tag_link='<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/' . urlencode(urldecode($tag))
 . '" title="' . __('See the Technorati tag page for', 'BunnyTags') . ' ''
 . urldecode($tag) . ''." rel="tag">' . $display_tag . '</a>' . $separator;
 // make a link to the technorati tag page, with tag link text

And replace it with this:

 $tag_link='<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/' . urlencode(urldecode($tag))
 . '?from=' . get_settings('home') . '" title="'
 . __('On Technorati: see posts from this blog tagged', 'BunnyTags') . ' ''
 . urldecode($tag) . ''." rel="tag">' . $display_tag . '</a>' . $separator;
 // make a link to the technorati tag page, with tag link text

This isn’t quite the same as pointing them to a page on your blog which contains all the posts. But the final result is pretty similar. Otherwise, Fabienne says that Jerome’s Keywords Plugin does the trick for her.