Pietro Posted January 31, 2008 (edited) I decided to start a new thread to express even more how the ontological problem is separated and uphill respect to the ethical problem. This thread refers back to: Tao Bums Forum Growth and development Folksonomy, For Pietro (and anyone else who cares) Hello Sean, thanks for letting me know of the post you wrote on Folksonomy. I missed that at the time. Yes the concept of tagging in mind opening. The idea of tagging individual posts is not new. It has been tried before by Anthony Eden, when he programmed, following the specifications from Russell Beattie, tagsurf. Tag Surf was essentially a forum where you could tag the posts individually. Like I suggested for the threads. But the individual posts, like you specified. When it came out, I thought it was going to be a break through. It ended up being a hole in the water (italian expression litterally translated: meaning something totally useless, like trying to dig a hole in the water). Why? First of all every internet technology needs a certain number of people to be turned on. For example wikis need few very dedicated people. Or a LOT of partially dedicated. So communities where the community is already there, and they start a wiki, like for wikipedia, are succesful, but when the community is not there, or it is too small, often the wiki will just not turn on. The more the people has a topic to work on, the less people need to be there. Intranet corporate wiki can be very small, but still succesful. Tag surf was a technological jewel, which had no community, and no topic. First it was used to discuss tagsurf itself, then it became Anthony's blog, and then that ended too. I tried to convince Anthony to release the code, but (long story short) we never managed to get an agreement for taobum.com. He wanted to keep the code private and to have all the posts appear also in his website, and well, the content of the posts at taobum.com where not of the kind you would want to appear in your main website. The second problem is that posts are generally too vapid, too short lived to be tagged. People rarely (and inconsistently) tag articles they have written, while they more often tag (in del.icio.us) articles that are too long for them to read then. One line quotes are nearly never tagged. So giving the possibility to people to tag posts is not going to work, IMO. At least not as the basic structure. It can be an addition that can be added in some cases. We tried to make a system to tag objects that were being sold on ebay, but it never took off. Part of the reason was that those objects only exist for short time. Then they are sold. Why would someone invest time to recover something that they will not need anymore. Better to have it forgotten. Similarly if you could have access to your memory, you would tag days, events, episodes, but you wouldn't tag paragraphs, and individual comments. The cost/benefit ratio is (unfortunately) too low. Nevertheless, the idea of taging post could be made to work through a lot of work. Examples: You could potentially have the title of the thread be one of the tags, so you could have more than one title, and then a post might appear in more than one thread (with of course all the problems in terms of spam that this might generate), and so on. You could have that when you answer one (or more) post(s) you get to chose from the tags of the previous post(s) which one are still valid. I don't hide you that the idea is extrememly interesting. And as you said, it could made it all to appear as if nothing was going on in the background, while this great indexing machine was working. Still I would suggest that we start by tagging the threads. This in line with the extreme programming idea, of doing only what is really necessary. Also one thing was to start from an empty website, but now we have a full blown forum with hundreds of people, and we just cannot start again from scratch. So we need to make tiny changes. Ones the threads can be tag cloud tagged, (i.e. by many users), then we can extend to the point of being able to tag the single post, and make those tags appear in the thread too. But let me suggest to go slow. And avoid the thin ice. And the last thing we need to take care of is that, the fact that something is theorethically possible (as in, there is the mathemathical solution to this equation) does not mean that it is also computationally feasible. Maybe once every post has its own tag cloud, the amount of data that need tobe handled is just too big. Whereas if we just tag each thread we are working with an amount of data which is at least one order of magnitude smaller. One thing that I will insist is to use tag clouds and not tag sets at every level. I have serious reasons to suggest this. About the reantacoder thing. Yes, that was exactly what I was thinking about. I tried rent a coder myself, but I could not get a coder for my project (just debugging an open source program from an annoying bug). So I avoided mentioning specifically that website. But if you had better luck, or you know better how to use it, then we should definitly (try to) use it. We might even consider contacting Anthony, and hear if he is interested in helping us. Maybe by now he is willing to use some of his code. Regarding the cost, I am more than willing to pay the other half, provided the code becomes open source. Said that, as part of this community I think that the more people are involved in the specification, implementation, chipping in, the more it will be a community feature. And since to work it needs to be used by the community, the more people believe in it, the higher are the probability that it gets used. tao-te-wiki teaches. Also, if we start to have a coder, from rent a coder, it could even become our standard coder, to which we refer all the time. A little bit like mediawiki has become for wikipedia. I had this funny intuition as I was choosing the word ontology SO I was baited ontology (you spell onthology, same thing right?) Well the ontology of taoism is: -water method -diet -everything else Where as the Onthology is what we are discussing here Edited January 31, 2008 by Pietro Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Mal Posted February 1, 2008 Nevertheless, the idea of taging post could be made to work through a lot of work Errr, yes, o.k. seems a lot quicker to just to skip what you don't want to read. Although I like the Tag idea, would be usefull for actually searching the forum database. Tagging posts, not really my idea of a fun way to spend my online time (did enough Database design and SQL's at Uni) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Yoda Posted February 1, 2008 I would love a greater degree of searchability around here!!! After spinning off a separate Kunlun forum, I think this is the top priority. Sounds like Sean is a seriously busy guy, though, so I don't know where that leaves us. I think there is a tremendous amount of useful information here that doesn't get to see the light of day that it deserves. I like the thought that taobums could be *the* wiki of Asian esoteric practices one fine day. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Pietro Posted February 1, 2008 I would love a greater degree of searchability around here!!! After spinning off a separate Kunlun forum, I think this is the top priority. Sounds like Sean is a seriously busy guy, though, so I don't know where that leaves us. I think there is a tremendous amount of useful information here that doesn't get to see the light of day that it deserves. I like the thought that taobums could be *the* wiki of Asian esoteric practices one fine day. Don't tell me! if we get to make those tags I am looking forward to suggest a way to let similar threads automatically be suggested. Like the "if you enjoyed this you might want to read this" function in Amazon. I have thought it all, and it would just use tags. If you look on my blog I even describe how to do it. Also right now the threads are mostly in a time structure. If they start to appear in a topic structure you get to read on a topic until you are familiar. Imagine looking for all the threads on retention. Or on kunlun. or on the healing tao. It would be like having a different forum for each topic. Except that all topics are just one forum. Speaking about holding the One! It would be like turning on the Turbo. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Mal Posted February 2, 2008 Don't tell me! if we get to make those tags I am looking forward to suggest a way to let similar threads automatically be suggested. Like the "if you enjoyed this you might want to read this" function in Amazon. I have thought it all, and it would just use tags. Yes that would be great and may lead to more bumping of threads rather than just new ones, which I would like. At the moment I misdirect the search engine to get into this page http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?act=Search&f= it searches quite well, but re-grouping by tags would be sweet. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
sean Posted February 3, 2008 Pietro, haven't had a chance just yet to respond but I will soon. Awesome post. Sean Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Pietro Posted February 3, 2008 Pietro, haven't had a chance just yet to respond but I will soon. Awesome post. Sean No prob, Sean; we are all very busy. Take your time, too. Pietro Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
