[TagCommons-WG] Tags for other things than bookmarks

[Thomas Vander Wal]

Both Mac OSX 4 (Tiger) and Microsoft Windows Vista have tagging capabilities
built in.

On the Mac there are quite a few applications for tagging (Quicksilver,
Yojimbo, MailTags, with many more that I have lost track of).  I have heard
about others on Windows, but have not been tracking them.

The original application that people used for tagging was Lotus Magellan,
which was built on DOS and was released about 1987 or so, with a more usable
version 2 about 1990.  The tags could be placed in a document or in the
metadata wrapper around a document for easier aggregation.  Many of the
users of Magellan that I knew added simple terms to the wrapper in a similar
manner to tagging in del.icio.us (off the top of their head) as hooks for
aggregating the information later.

Some of the big research wings in the computing industry have been looking
at tagging desktop files for quite some time. There are people adding tags
within documents (usually with a prefix) for easy aggregation with Google
desktop search or Blinkx Pico on Windows machines.

Where things get really interesting is collapsing the personal tagging space
across devices and services (desktop, Amazon, del.icio.us, RawSugar,
Ma.gnolia, Flickr, and inside the firewall tagging applications).  This is
transfer and cross walled garden aggregation is where I believe things
should head, which will require a standard structure to ease enabling this
into a functional reality.


On 2/16/07 8:58 PM, "Bill Ward" <bill at wards.net> wrote:

> Too much of the tagging discussion seems to be around bookmarking.
> Frankly I don't need more than one tagging service for that -
> del.icio.us seems to do the job just fine.  What I want to see is
> tagging used in other areas, like organizing documents on a desktop
> (shared or otherwise).

All the best,
Thomas

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