Tagging in Geneone Forum, Take 2
June 1st, 2006
Due to the sheer uselessness and poor implementation of the old Geneone forum tagging system, I have been working on rebuilding it from scratch this week to be more useful and to stay closer to the original philosophy of tagging - that end users should organize and tag information.
The new tagging system was inspired by del.icio.us which, in my opinion, has one of the best tagging implementations out there.
Adding Tags
When you create a new discussion or discussion comment, you’ll be given the opportunity to add tags to it. Below the text box are autocomplete suggestions. Below that, you’ll have a list of all of your tags and tags which are popular in the forum. If you look at the list of suggestions you’ll see the first one is in italics; if you press TAB, that tag will be automatically completed.
Everyone can tag and they can use their own tags to find discussions they’ve read before. You don’t have to rely on other people having tagged discussions with the right tags. If a certain number of people tag a discussion with the same tag, it becomes a global tag. When it becomes a global tag, anyone can find that discussion using the tag. It’ll also be suggested as a tag for people.
Tag Cloud
I’ve previously said I don’t like tag clouds. The thing is, I don’t. However, I made the decision to use tag clouds in the forum. I hope that the tag cloud implementation should be quite non-obtrusive. This tag cloud is much less striking than others - instead of a tag size being any size between two font sizes, there are only 5 different tag sizes.
The CSS looks a bit like this:
.tagcloud a { color: #5456B6; font-size: 11px; }.tagcloud em a { font-style: normal; color: #000080; }.tagcloud em em a { font-size: 13px; }.tagcloud em em em a { font-weight: bold; }.tagcloud em em em em a { font-size: 16px; }
The difference between the smallest and largest tag is a small colour change, font weight change and font size change.
Public Tags
A-la social networking, you can view anyone else’s tags. The forum is a bit like a "Web 2.0" application stuck at version 1.1 and it’s essentially a small social network. It’d be interesting to integrate some of these social web features from sites such as Digg and Myspace into a forum.
How very 2.0! Live search through the tags by member name or their tags.
Digg
StumbleUpon
Have you ever thought of putting in a tag auto-discovery feature?
Prehaps just a simple function can look through a users post content. It would work similar to a search spider for example in that it looks for repeated or popular words and parses in a post (while stripping out common words such as "a", "the", "as", etc) and then populating a input box for the user.
I think that this would cut down on the amount of untagged posts and could possibly recommend pretty good tags, especially if theres like list that the admins can maintain that a post is automatically searched for. (example a forum is about programming so the tags that we might want to look in a post for is "php", "mysql" and "perl", and if these are mentioned in the post, its likely that the post is about them (especially if mentioned more then once) and we can then tag them as so.
That’s an interesting idea. I tried an experiment last year which was similar to this - it used Yahoo’s term extraction service to try and find some keywords and store them in the database. Needless to say, the quality of the tags wasn’t great. I do like the idea of using it to provide recommendations though with the user filtering out the bad terms.
I think the main thing which will cause a tagging feature to work is whether it is useful to the person who tagged it and that it isn’t too much work for too little gain. Your idea could certainly make it a lot faster and pleasant to tag.