learnedax | (no subject)

So, Livejournal now has, in their words, "full Tags support." Of course, their idea of "full" is letting you view one specific user's entries filtered by content tag, making it really an inline version of the Memory system*. It's a pretty trivial addition to the S2 infrastructure to let you filter any view by tag, and a not-too-difficult advanced configuration feature to allow specification by user, or even substring/regex matching. I've toyed with adding the functionality to my own style, which is impractical mainly because I can't add a configuration page for it. Well, they can, and did, it's just weak.

Well, at least their beginning to address the (frequently requested and easy to implement) tagging feature, maybe it will improve over time.

*That is, it let's you memo(r)ize keyword filtering on post creation, rather than making it an extra step, but is otherwise functionally the same as the Memory system, AFAIK.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, see this article (http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html) for a somewhat interesting, if fairly obvious, analysis of the reasons for using tagging the way del.icio.us does. There are good reasons for both routes, but I think a happier medium could be obtained by allowing categorization on a per user basis. That is, if you have 50 tags which to your mind at the moment fit in 6 categories, you should be able to make 6 groups to handle them, refining the groups' contents at any time as you see fit.

Proper handling of user-defined grouping, ideally including addition, subtraction, union, and intersection, is a well-understood and cheap to implement process that far too many systems lack for no obvious reason. Bringing things back to Livejournal, I ought to be able to define a Carolingia friend group as the intersection of Boston and SCA, and then lock a post to Carolingia + a specific 3 people, without jumping through inordinate hoops. Granted, the majority of users are not clamoring for this feature - but it's not really very expensive at all, either.