A response to managing tags and categories

Joseph A. di Paolantonio recently blogged a great post about the initial work i have been doing on relating categories and tags around the Internet. As you may or may not have picked up from my blog, the last 2 weeks have been about me finishing my previous job and moving on to some start up ideas i have had. Therefore I must apologise for the delay in replying; however, I have revised some of taghop.ORG based on what some of you folks told me and i'm ready to do business again!

Let's start out with some of the questions Josepth asked - please note that i am in the stage before "Early Stage" in my thinking, so there are some basic questions still looking for answers. Let's think of taghop.ORG as a collaborative experiment for the moment!

• I found a "developer's page" - Is Taghop Open Source?
  No it's not. Mainly because there is no base code architecture yet manly because i'm stringing together some thoughts and hopefully the next few weeks will see some direction to it all. I will then have a rethink about whther that may be useful.
• What license is being used?
  Completely free. Early days, so if this changes i'll be sure to let you know. However, for users this will always be free.
  
• Scaling: the presentation of how blogs are related seems a bit cumbersome, but the "example" showing graphical relationships is cool - perhaps a "map" of relationships might be better than a list. Or I may not understand how the relationship presentation works.
  I completely agree and have simplified things somewhat. I do wish i was a Flash expert!! Or even a graphics expert. However, i'm starting with text just now to see whether there is any point in looking at more advanced techniques. I'd sure be happy to listen to anyone who could drop in a Flash prototype though! (not used it since the days of Splash!!)
  
• Is there anyway to add a tag/category to multiple URL's at once? It took me quite a bit of time to add the few URL's and tags that I've done so far.
  Not yet, but a good idea. I wasn't sure how popular something like this may become, so bulk addings wasn't an issue. However you have a very rich category system in your blog and i can imaging it would be hugely advantageous for you to be able to relate multiple categories in one go.
  
• I see that there is a toolbar for IE, when is one coming for Firefox, Mosilla, Opera, Safari, etc? I don't use IE, except to test new CSS; so I'm not sure if the toolbar answers my above question.
  Possibly. The IE toolbar isn't for taghop.ORG yet - you may notice i have a .com and .ORG site. The .ORG site is what i am looking at just now - however, the toolbar is not build for the .ORG site. Sorry for the confusion - it's one of these things "will anyone ever look at it" - well, now i know - "yes".
  
• Is the best use of Taghop to have accounts at del.icio.us, flikr, Bayosphere, your own blogs, and the like, and to use Taghop to relate among one's own various accounts, web use and online social networks? That is, I get the feeling that one shouldn't try to import all of their bookmarks or blogmarks to Taghop, but only general or personalized pages at other online services that use a tagging system.
  Spot on - yes. taghop.ORG is not for all of your links to be sent there. It's purpose is to relate generate "types" of information, such as tags and categories. In addition, if you have a page that is not explicitly a category, such as your local news site, you can relate this to. In this sense you aren't relating the content of the page so much as the type content that can be found there. That make sense. The example on the site has some links in this way.
  
• How could Taghop help me achieve my goals of creating some "starting point" categories for our upcoming syndication aggregator/feed reader/blogging service and some more general categories for Bayosphere Citizen Journalists?
  I think "starting point" is a great way to phrase it. The way the web works is pretty fluid - you will start at some resource and continue from there. The problem we have just now is that relations between the types of things you may be interested in don't really exist. So getting from category A to tag B is generally done by referencing a link within that cetegory rather than the category itself (if at all). This means that for every item you would have to reference something in that category, rather than just say "these things are like those things". So, as a starting point, you would have the base categories or tags that you manage or own - from there you can provide related options that people can explore. In fact the more people who collaborate the more useful the system becomes as popular categories will rise to the top. I have still to do some work on getting this part to work, but i'd imagine it may be fairly useful. You may also come at it from a user point of view. You may say here i am, here are my friends and allow people to navigate those links to see what related topics they may be interested in seeing. It gives a high enough view that you can actually start to take in the relationships between information rather than looking at the actually documents and such below there. Commonly, you may combine the two and say here is our blog roll and the related categories they offer - from that point it is simply a case of hopping the tags to discover related information.
  What I am considering (feedback please) would be the ability to then grab category based RSS feeds so that you could "hop" through categories and feeds of information, aggregating these and ignoring the rest. I'd like to hear thoughts on this one.
  
• What are the different purposes of taghop.COM and taghop.ORG? How should we use each to best help taghop?
  The .com site is some research at the moment. I'd stick with .ORG for just now. Please register on the .com site and play around, but my focus is on the possibilities of relating information for the moment.
  

I hope this is useful. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. It's early days and i'm just getting used to being able to think about this during the day now, so expect to here more and thanks for commenting Josepth.

steven :: Release 2.0 :: http://stevenR2.com