[Tagdb] Multi-Word Tags Vs Single Word Tags

[Nitin Borwankar]

It's possible to get the best of both worlds by allowing multiword 
tagging but when you search for items by tag you do ..

....where tag like '% searchtag %'

instead of

....where tag = searchtag

i.e we search for words inside the multi word tags rather than words 
that exactly match the tag - note I have spaces around the search tag to 
avoid catching false positive substrings.
if you want to find words in tags using underscores you can replace 
spaces in the wildcard string with underscores.

This allows the same delicious like url's to be constructed - the items 
returned by the url will have both tags = searchtag and tags containing 
search tag

It gets a bit messier in the API and the database but if people want to 
use such things, its not an either/or proposition.

Nitin Borwankar


Michal Migurski wrote:

>> Now with multi-word tags users can use entire phrases like 'a trip to 
>> london' to tag items which they would have tagged as 'london' 'trip' 
>> incase of single word tags. This makes the tagged item difficult to 
>> discover, making the tag and thus the user to tagged item 
>> relationship non-social (quite opposite to what a tag is supposed to 
>> do). 
>
>>
>> Why dont we define a standard for tagging? It would facilitate many 
>> apps utilizing tagging to become interoperable, laying down an 
>> architecture of participation.
>
>
> .
>
> This would be a serious vibekiller, I think. Keywords aren't exactly a 
> runaway success story.
>
> Multi-word tags: it feels intuitively simpler to me to tag something 
> "London" and "trip", and then search for the union of those tags. This 
> is in contrast to "London trip", "trip to London", "trip: London", and 
> "London (trip)", and many of the other variants that may be left 
> unfound by a particular search for a multiword tag. The other benefit 
> of single-word tags that I've seen is that they promote swarming 
> around a chosen term. Seems like every event I've been to this year 
> converges on some shared group tag that names all the relevant photos 
> and links, e.g. "etech06" or whatever, which translates very cleanly 
> and unambiguously into 
> URLs: http://del.icio.us/tag/etech06, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/etech06/, http://technorati.com/tag/etech06, 
> etc.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
>
> michal migurski- contact info, blog, and pgp key:
>
> sf/ca            http://mike.teczno.com/contact.html
>
>
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