1. Sandeep Shetty: @BarnabyWalters So you have 3 types of tags (from an interface perspective): note body, meta data (visible) & machine tags (invisible)?

    sandeepshetty yep, this is certainly something I need to document on the wiki.

    In fact most of the machine tags were a hack to add schemaless data to my MySQL-managed schema, but as I move to flat files + ad hoc indexes I might migrate some of my machine tags to “real” data — it’s not like they’re doing much good where they are at the moment.

    The main benefit is easy editing — I just use my tag editing UI instead of building another UI for each different bit of data.

  2. Sandeep Shetty: Anyone using/used/implemented machine tags (triple tags)? Are they worth it? #indieweb

    sandeepshetty add .json to the end of any of my note URLs and have a look in the tags array — or in the source (hidden by default) to see how I use them. I added location data to this note so you can see the tags I use for that.

  3. Tags and categories have different connotations. To me, tags are community, collaboration, flexibility, fuzziness, visibile metadata. Categories are authority, rigidity, structure, taxonomy. Tags can be found inside content (), categories are separate, controlling entities. Content owns tags. People own tags. Categories own content. Authority owns categories.

    Beware of vague naming — some software mistakes one for the other (e.g. Mediawiki categories are in fact many-to-many).

    The organisational technique used doesn’t only have technical and usability implications, but social and philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical?) ones.

  4. Erin Jo Richey: @BarnabyWalters Tags provide bottom-up structure and information architecture, categories provide top-down structure and IA.

    .Erin Richey my reasoning is that tags are something you add to content, whereas categories are something you put content into. Tags -> content -> categories — so categories are higher up in the pecking order.

  5. Abigail Harrison: Hashtags: do people really use them to discover? Hands-up people.... maybe social media people do and 'normal' people don't? #twittersci

    .abigailH hashtag discovery usage is low because of Twitters anaemic implementation. See Diaspora for a great, well-used implementation.