Links, Links, Links, Links

Matt at DoubleLoop has a new post on a survey of link collectors / organisers. As he says the common feature is Tags, Tags, Tags, Tags, but for me what is key is the semantics of Why, Why, Why, Why ?

The thing I liked about del.ici.ous was that the links were to categories, and since you could create the categories themselves, you could categorise the categories too, though I see no evidence of inheritance in the linking. I wonder if any of the others stretches that far. (Must look at both del.ici.ous and CiteULike again more closely.)

It’s like this …

If I have a category of “People” with 10 “Members”
And I have another category of “Animals” with 10 “Members”, one of which is “People”
Does my click on “Animals” return 10 or 19 hits ?
64,000 dollar question.

If that’s possible – then I make my categories aspectual – ie in terms of why the interest / intent / reason in the link, rather than simply “what is at the end of it”, then Robert is your father’s brother – Semantic Web – I think you’ll find.

You may have read it here first.

3 thoughts on “Links, Links, Links, Links”

  1. Sure you can add multiple tags to a query w/ del.icio.us. The default for the combination is AND, I think, so in your example above users would see results tagged ANIMALS and PEOPLE. From your account page, select a single tag, like blogtech, & note the new “related tags” column that appears on the right of the screen. When you select the small plus sign next to the related tag, it adds it to your search query, as well as outputting a URL that yuo could hard code into your template if you wanted to. See for instance Blogtech + Del.icio.us on Freshblog. Since your account page is public, visitors can combine these tags any way they want to. See their navigation help for examples of the url syntax.

  2. Thanks for folowing-up John. I guess I really need to try this out to see, but I suspect you may miss my subtlety. Maybe not, maybe I don’t fully appreciate how del.ici.ous works.

    I can see that users can choose any combination of the tags that I present them, but I want some tags to be combined, because I have already tagged one tag with a second tag. I tag the people tag with the animal tag, then users selecting the animal tag get returned animals and people (or at least the people tag).

    I’ll move the correpondence forward to the most recent post.
    http://www.psybertron.org/?p=1186
    Let me experiment a bit.
    Thanks again.
    Ian

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