I am attending the talk about tagging by James Kalbach here at the Web 2.0 Expo now but well, it’s really just an overview. One thing he says is though:

“Use comma-separated tags instead of space-separated ones”

This makes sense as it makes you easier to tag terms with a space in them. But that would only be really useful if every site would use the same system. For me it’s always a problem to figure out which system to use and mostly use the wrong one. So what about allowing people to use both systems? It’s simple to test:

Is a comma in the string they probably used a comma separated list, if there is no comma in there, try to split them by spaces.

Maybe something we should take into account when it comes to tagging in Plone.

Beside this the talk is rather boring, more giving an overview but not getting further. Talking about the semantic web would have been great, talking about ontologies etc. would have been great, too. For social networks it would be a great feature to enable people to create the ontology by crowdsourcing. Of course this needs to be made easy enough for them to do.

Now he just answered a question about synonyms and he answered that some mechanism for them is not needed as the tag cloud will take care of it. Now add languages to that problem and I doubt even more that he’s correct there. For my tagging at least it’s gets more and more annoying to add all the correct tags if I want a “complete” coverage.

So next talk, please

Tags: web2expoberlin, web2expo, berlin, conference, tagging, tags