Bookmarking and tags
I've been using http://del.icio.us/ and its Firefox plugin for bookmarking for awhile, and I've got mixed feelings about it. The plugin almost does what I want, but it's coming up short. (My home-grown bookmark manager comes up short, too, so this isn't enough to make me quit using del.icio.us.)
But I've been thinking about tags and missing the hierarchical structure I'm used to. I've been reading about del.icio.us and tags and hierarchies and the consensus is "hierarchies suck, tag folksonomies are the bomb." And I'm not sure I agree. At least not with the way tags are simply implemented in del.icio.us.
Here's the problem: Not all tags are equal, yet del.icio.us treats them as such. Not all tags mean the same thing in all contexts, yet del.icio.us doesn't "know" that.
For instance... I tag "Better Homes and Gardens" with "magazines." I tag "Joe's Five-Star Military Surplus" with "magazines". Now the "magazines" tag, as a category is messed up... viewing bookmarks tagged with "magazines" gets me bookmarks that are unrelated.
So now we need some more tags to help differentiate. How about "media" and "firearms". Okay, if I want to find all my suppliers of ammo magazines, I can click on "firearms" and narrow that down to "magazines". That kind of works.
But here's where that gets messy... it means I have this big mess of tags in which "udev" is considered as important as "Linux", where "magazines" is meaningless because I can't use it at the top level. And the "Cloud" view doesn't fix this... I'm not real fond of clouds, and especially not here. The cloud view equates frequency with importance.... but that doesn't hold true.
Of my "unbundled" tags, "store" is the most frequent... yet "store" is, in my mind, and in every case, a sub-category of something else. I'm going to click "geocaching" and then "store" or "DVD" and "store". But because I have (apparently) more shopping links than anything else in my bookmarks, del.icio.us thinks "store" is my most important tag and puts it at the top of the list. (Cloud view or list+frequency view.)
And here's the problem... "Web 1.0" as hierarchies supposedly are, hierarchies are damned useful ways of organizing and accessing data. One of the biggest requirements I have of my bookmark managager is that it must keep my most used links right at my fingertips.... I can't be drilling through two or three levels of tags to find them. But not only must they be at my fingertips, they must be organized in a meaningful manner.
And that's where del.icio.us is falling down... it's great for all those obscure things I want to keep track of, where being able to find the link is important and speed isn't.
Sure, I can tag all those "speed links" as "important" and then view the "important" tag... but those are in an arbitrary order. Alphabetical or by date added... the link to my credit card company is twelve links away from the link to my bank, and I want that information grouped by type.
"Group by specified tag" is the option I need there.
Maybe I should embed that category information into the title.... "BANK: Wachovia Bank". (Not my bank, by the way.) Then I could sort by alpha and the tags would all get grouped properly.
I have that problem inside categories as well... I have four bookmarks into http://geocaching.com/ ... the "my" page, my personal search page, the main page, and the forums. But I discovered that "obvious" tagging didn't group them together or make them easy to find as a set... I ended up creating a tag of "geocaching.com". I really don't want tags named after the site every time I want to "deep link" into a regularly-used site.
I've seen evidence of people creating a hierarchy by stacking tags...
gps
gps.geocaching
gps.geocaching.groundspeak
gps.geocaching.stores
gps.utilities
gps.stores
Those are a little unwieldy as tags. Yet it expresses a relationship between tags, which is what I'm looking for. If del.icio.us just recognized each element as being a "tag" and I could collapse "gps" and get it out of the way when I'm not looking at GPS stuff, that'd be ideal.
The "tag bundles" start to address this ("hierarchy is dead" but hey, apparently people keep asking for it!), but they don't entirely work. They minimize the clutter into smaller groups of clutter, but they don't actually remove the clutter.
And I've only got 56 bookmarks... imagine how unmanagable this must get at over 2400 bookmarks, which is, as you'll recall, the number of bookmarks stored in my old system.
Thinking about this some more, I think a lot of this is because I am a visual and spatial thinker. When I write code, I "see" data structures in my head. And I navigate my "most used" bookmarks by their physical location on the bookmark page more than I do by category and name... I just know that "Comics" is located "right there". Move my "Comics" link and you'll confuse me, because I'll have to start processing data instead of just "knowing" where the link is.
And del.icio.us doesn't work that way at all. Nailing down links to specific physical positions on the screen (or tool bar) is almost impossible... things are sorted by age or frequency or alphabetically. Add more links or tags or favorite tags or tag groupings and links move around.
I think that's why I want narrow, clear classifications. The smaller lists of things are, the faster I can visually navigate them... the less data there is to process and the easier it is to match the visual pattern I'm looking for.