[Tagdb] Single and multi-word tags / swarming and spreading

[Michal Migurski]

On Apr 7, 2006, at 4:02 AM, Timothy Spalding wrote:

> So here's my two cents:
<snip>

A week later, I mostly agree with pretty much everything there. I'll  
add two more cents below.

> The union of "London" and "trip" may seem intuitive to you. But  
> London isn't Los Angeles, Santa Clara or Tiera del Fuego. Or take  
> "spring semester. "London" and "trip" make sense on their own;  
> "Spring semester" does not. The union of "spring" and "semester"?  
> How about the union of "spring," "training" "red" and "sox"? Or  
> shall we look for the union of "springTraining" and "red_sox"?  
> Congratulations, you need an "about" page to tell people how to  
> tag, and your users are all programmers.

Very true, though when I mentioned searching for a union, what I  
think I meant was a search like "London Trip" pulling up all the  
items tagged with "London" and "Trip", which was entered as "London  
Trip" prior to being saved in the database. This is in effect  
transparent to the end-user.

The broader question for me is - at what point do these stop being  
tags, and start being a general metadata free-text field, searched  
with full-text indexes and all the benefits that confers? Since this  
is a list ostensibly about database implementation of tags, is the  
consensus approaching a slightly-constrained version of Plain Old  
Search? For me, the primary (unrelated to recall) characteristic of a  
tag is that it is a destination. This is implicit in the way that  
Flickr, Del.icio.us, and others make them first-class parts of the  
URL instead of hiding them after a "?q=". This leads to the swarming  
behavior we see in tags like "squaredcircle" or "etech06" - I don't  
know of anyone using Google SERP's in this way, while tags are  
routinely created and popularized as a place rather than a thing:  
"see everyone's photos and links at 'uncamp06'." It may be the case  
that this social phenomenon can be adequately represented using  
vintage DB techniques and no special nod to the tag-as-object.

-mike.

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