The future will be tagified

I am an avid user of Ken Ferry's Keyword Assistant — it has pretty much replaced titles in my usage of iPhoto. I tag everything I can: the people, places, and events in my pictures. The tags pretty much are a title — why name a picture “Anthony and Susie in the Carpenter's Arms” when I can tag it with Anthony, Susie, Carpenter's Arms (any maybe Pub, Windsor… you get the idea)?

I can imagine a future where this kind of approach is taken everywhere. The Web is already heading this way, with Flickr and del.icio.us spawning a host of tag-based systems, and the increasing focus on meta-data in modern operating systems is a reassuring sign.

I remember people demanding nested albums in iPhoto. That would be good, able to capture some semantics that tags make more obscure, but it introduces the modelling problem that all hierarchies (that model taxonomies) face: is it Turkey > Holidays in Turkey, or Holidays > Holidays in Turkey? Turkey ∧ Holiday is pretty unambiguous.

No, for most users tags are enough, especially when (as Keyword Assistant does) they autocomplete and look into your Address Book. My iPhoto RDF plugin tries to go the next step, mapping a tag (because that's what iPhoto keywords are) to a chunk of RDF, but it's definitely open to improvements. I'd like to see more meaning attached to tags, perhaps along the lines of Tidepool, where you tag with events, places, dates, and people, but I suppose it's not strictly necessary.

What would be cool, as I conclude this somewhat fragmented post, is tags throughout the system. The Finder has its labels (only 10, used for colours), and iTunes has its Grouping field. I'd really use iTunes tags — rather than making playlists to define set membership, I'd use tags. Maybe tags for “guilty pleasures” and “good songs”, so I can only play songs I'm not embarrassed by when others are around? Tags for all songs that are covers of Bowie songs? It's only a step from there to real formal semantics….

5 posts in a day. I do apologise.

Posted at 2005-02-09 09:04:38 by Richard • Link to The future will be…
Comments, trackbacks.

Remote access

I love the possibilities of remote access to my work server while I'm working at home. Not just the simple things, like printing out documents for other people to look at — it's the crafty stuff, like entering

say "Dave... what are you doing, Dave?"

in the Mac OS X Terminal. I look forward to terrorising my co-workers with that one. Try it out!

Posted at 2005-02-09 08:01:50 by Richard • Link to Remote access
Comments, trackbacks.

Taste for the Web

Much as I like Paul Graham, this parody is too good to pass up. Marvellous.

Posted at 2005-02-09 06:26:32 by Richard • Link to Taste for the Web
Comments, trackbacks.

Subtext

This is pretty cool. It's a programming language that doesn't use text — you manipulate a semantic graph through links and copies. Functional, lazy, and very interesting. Take a look at the screencast. The author suggests it's a form of example-centric programming, which I'd agree with.

Posted at 2005-02-09 05:46:24 by Richard • Link to Subtext
Comments, trackbacks.