Comments on: New stuff at Upcoming!

By: Brian Del Vecchio

Brian Del Vecchio — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 20:49:39 +0000

Um, of course I meant Leonard, not Lawrence. Sorry, Leonard.

By: Brian Del Vecchio

Brian Del Vecchio — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 23:59:24 +0000

We’re experimenting at this point, so let’s try a bunch of stuff and see what works, and what catches on.

As for Tantek not digging tags, the main difference that I see is that tags make it possible for users to create new associations that weren’t imagined by the original publishers or platform owners, while microformats can generally only be implemented by the content publishers. I’ve implemented both, and I can tell you that if the Upcoming.org guys doesn’t dig microformats (I know that at least Lawrence doesn’t), it’s not going to happen. Open tagging, however, makes it possible for outsiders to add metadata, and build something from the metadata.

By: Kevin Bjorke

Kevin Bjorke — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 20:25:58 +0000

I’m not saying to enforce any semantics on tags, only to acknowledge the idea of a colon (or “=” whatever) as a separator for value pairs. The semantics can be emergent but it would be handy for tools (flickr, some API hack, whatever) if there were some useful convention for the syntax (only).

By: FactoryJoe

FactoryJoe — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 20:08:48 +0000

Sure sure... but it should be emergent. I see the tag-colon nomenclature as simulating macros... or enabling them. I don't think standardizing outright makes much sense. We've got conventions like to:read, to:try, for:someone, plazes:[hash] and so on... I think the beauty of this is that it's totally emergent and flat. Anyone can do whatever they want. Vimeo is great example of this -- though perhaps taking it too far by allowing you to use flickr:imagenumber to get photos to show up in your sidebars. I mean, cool, but then you've just limited your members to uploading to Flickr. Allow for free colon-tags but also allow for multiple-platform pairings. We could just as easily use eventful:eventID as upcoming:eventID. It seems this pairing might actually be better and more community specific than trying to give events some kind of UID. With tagging, you get original context and mashup-ability. A win-win sofaras I can tell now.

By: Kevin Bjorke

Kevin Bjorke — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:52:57 +0000

Note that searches on upcoming:46797 lose the colon.

I was just thinking about the lack of tag=value pairs as a sort of tag, and wondering if/when flickr might support them (microformats depend on these, for example: rel=”blah” etc). It would be good to be able to search for “upcoming:46797″ while having the same images all also included in a search simply for “upcoming” without having to add a second unadorned “upcoming” tag to each of them

I mentioned this to Tantek but he dismissed it instantly saying “some people will use ‘location’ and some will use ‘geo’ or ‘loc’ and you can’t have that” but that seems like a poor excuse. Synonym remapping is trivial and has a long history in UIs already.

Tags within tags. Seems inevitable. In fact we can see it’s already here.

By: Brian Del Vecchio

Brian Del Vecchio — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:38:24 +0000

Thanks for the plug, Chris. I’ll let you know when I have something to show, but in the meantime, I’m hoping to drum up enough cross-tagging to get other mashers started. Your link will surely help, thanks!

The most-tagged event so far (for mashers to experiment with) is last week’s BarCamp NY, tagged with upcoming:46797.

Also, it’s great to see the Upcoming.org team getting settled at the Y! and pushing some great new features out.