Please Play With This: Tagging Beta

Hi folks -- with the R5 release, the tech folks put a new feature into beta for testing. It's a new front end for tagging your entries.

Now, before I go any further, I should say that it hasn't gone through the whole design and testing process yet -- the tech folks just kind of threw it together as a proof-of-concept to see if it would work. So the final product may look and act quite a bit differently. [Update, 12/19: Tagging is live now. It works as described here]

Also, this tag test doesn't work yet in Microsoft Internet Explorer (including the browser that is part of the AOL software) -- I've tried it using recent editions of Firefox and Netscape (which are both Mozilla-based browsers), and it works fine, but it this tag test won't yet work with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

[6/13 Update: The tag test now works with Microsoft Internet Explorer, so please read on and give it a shot.. Note that it does kill my next joke. Thanks -- Joe]

Did I mention that the tag test doesn't yet work with Microsoft Internet Explorer?

(The sound you just heard was the majority of readers clicking to close this browser window.)

Anyway, for the folks who are left, since you're the folks who will ultimately be using whatever tagging front end we come up with, we're asking that you play around a bit and tell us what you think.

Now, I've talked a little bit about tagging before -- it's a way for you to self-categorize your stuff, so if you have a blog entry about, say, SpongeBob Madonna (I just made that up), you can label (or "tag") your post with SpongeBob Madonna, so when people search for blog entries and content tagged with "SpongeBob Madonna", your blog posts should show up, along with everything else that's been tagged the same way.

This kind of creator-tagging is a way to help label and categorize stuff for search engines and such, that's a little different from a traditional category or taxonomy system.

For starters, anyone can do it (some tagging schemes, like what Flickr does, also give content creators the option to let readers tag stuff -- that's not what we're testing, though, we're just testing creator-tags).

Also, there isn't a rigid hierarchy you have to conform to. An example of a traditional hierarchy might be Celebrities > Entertainment > Music > Cartoon Parody > SpongeBob Madonna, etc. I mean, you can use all those tags if you want to be super-thorough, but you don't have to. It's all up to you.

Implementing the tag syntax is slightly unwieldy -- it looks like this (if you're pasting into your Journal, make sure that the pulldown menu in the formatting toolbar says "HTML,"  not "Text," because otherwise the machines won't interpret the HTML code, they will just display it and it won't work):

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/SpongeBob+Madonna" rel="tag">SpongeBob Madonna</a>

What all that does is two things:

1. It tells someone (in this case, the Technorati blog search engine) that this particular blog entry has been tagged "SpongeBob Madonna"

2. If you click on the link, you should get Technorati search results that will display everything tagged "SpongeBob Madonna"

Okay, enough about tagging theory. How does it work here?

First, to get to the Journals beta, just stick a "beta." in the front of your Journal's address. For example, my Journal's address is: http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/

So to get to the beta, I would go to: http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/

Please note that this is a beta, so it's all still being worked on. Also note that changes that you make in your beta Journal will show up in your production (live) Journal, so you probably want to create a test/play Journal and mess around with the beta version of that, not your real Journal.

Once you're in your beta Journal, click Add Entry. You'll see the standard entry creation window, though it has a few extras (I'm only going to talk about tagging right now, but you guys are pretty smart.)

What we're concerned with is a little entry field at the bottom of the window marked "Tags" -- when you're in "Text" mode (in the menu pulldown on the formatting toolbar), what you type in the Tags box will also show up in the body of your entry, at the bottom:

What you type in the Tags box will be made into a clickable tag (done up like what I mentioned above), and will show up in the body of your post as you type. It will be at the bottom though you can edit it or move it as needed ... with a caveat below).

If you switch to HTML view in the formatting toolbar, you'll be able to see all the HTML formatting done for you to make it a real tag. (Remember, when you're in HTML mode, you won't be able to type into the Tags box -- it will be greyed out):

* To separate tags, use commas. Words separated by spaces will be treated as phrases.

* What you type in the Tags box will show up in the body of the entry. The opposite, however, is not true. If you switch back and forth between the Tags box and the body, you'll see that the Tags box overrides and resets what's in the body entry (that's one of the sticky things that we're not sure is going to fly with users.)

Now, tagging is a type of labelling of content (what we call "metadata" - data that describes other data). In the User Interface and Information Design worlds, you shouldn't really mix metadata with content, which is kind of what we're doing here.

For this and other reasons, some of the UI folks think it would be better if we broke out the tag part from the entry part, though I won't try to articulate their thinking here, because I won't be able to do it justice.

Then again, it is relatively easy to do it this way. So that's one of the things we'd like to get your opinion on.

Naturally, this is just a first step, since tagging goes arm-in-arm with personal categories (so, for example, you could have a different category for all your knitting entries, your nature photo posts, your Weekend Assignment entries,your posts about Cow Orkers, etc.).

It's also easy for people to self-organize around shared tags. You could have a set of tags that you use for your book club or sports team or whatever, so you could easily find each others' posts, etc.

Anyway, let us know what you think -- I'm pretty sure Holly, Yoel, Susan and John (you know, all the Journals folks who have blogs that are listed in my sidebar) will be talking about this and other aspects of the Journals next phase developments in their blogs, too.

That's it for me right now -- have a great weekend, Easter and Passover.

Also, don't forget: Monday is Tax Day for most of us, so feel free to start panicking and running around in circles if you like.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: tagging test, AOL Journals