LJ has introduced "tags", but as far as I can tell they're indistinguishable in utility from memories. I complained to Mark and I think he was aware of this, but it's lame nonetheless.
P.S. in case anyone from Danga reads this: I can't edit tags on this post. Is community ownership not sufficient? Or is evan_tech all screwed up 'cause it's not a community?
“Shared journals” don't have all of the spiffy maintainer stuff attached to them that communities do. Of course, with tags now you're supposed to start putting your “tech” entries in your normal journal and tagging them as such! I've yet to actually look into it and find out if that would work in practice, though. I'd certainly like to stop using custom security as my category-faking hack.
I think there are no limits at the moment in the number of tags allowed per entry. That makes them less restricting than memories. They can also be accessed via S2, unlike memories.
Tags have some UI issues, though. For example, if you tag an entry first and then untag it, the unused tag sticks around in manage/tags.bml, needing manual deletion.
I guess that makes sense if you want to allow others to tag your entries but not control your tags. You'd create a bunch of (empty) tags that others may apply.
Somebody out there is doing a unified tag space, maybe its these guys.
At The Robot Co-op we're doing something with flickr's tags for our upcoming website. We get some funny photos that way. (Batman, Turkey comes immediately to mind.)
Having tags shown with an entry, and linked to the page that shows all posts with that tag, is quite useful.
I guess your post begs the question of what else you wanted tags to do that they don't? The major thing I can think of is to filter your friend "subscriptions" (i.e., for each friend to show only posts with particular tags, or hide posts with particular tags) which I imagine is something they can add later based on this infrastructure.
OH. that would be a GREAT idea. i hate when i can't add someone to my friends list until i've gone back through everything and categorized all of my posts into increasingly complicated filtering systems. it would be lovely just to block them from certain tags.
Oh, that's actually the reverse of what I was saying! I was talking about being able to filter my friends' posts by tags — like, I only want norbert's "music" posts to show up, or I want all of darlene's posts except the "politics" and "rant" ones.
Tags have the advantage of being formalized into the protocol, so you can manipulate them with a client. Specifically, you can (should be able to) post an entry with them, instead of having to remember to edit your memories manually. More usable == better chance they'd be used effectively.
Is community ownership not sufficient? Or is evan_tech all screwed up 'cause it's not a community?
“Shared journals” don't have all of the spiffy maintainer stuff attached to them that communities do. Of course, with tags now you're supposed to start putting your “tech” entries in your normal journal and tagging them as such! I've yet to actually look into it and find out if that would work in practice, though. I'd certainly like to stop using custom security as my category-faking hack.
Tags have some UI issues, though. For example, if you tag an entry first and then untag it, the unused tag sticks around in manage/tags.bml, needing manual deletion.
I think that behavior is by design. You can also add tags directly from the management page and never actually use them, if you want.
Still, yuck.
i'd love to see tags linked across users, á la flickr.
At The Robot Co-op we're doing something with flickr's tags for our upcoming website. We get some funny photos that way. (Batman, Turkey comes immediately to mind.)
I guess your post begs the question of what else you wanted tags to do that they don't? The major thing I can think of is to filter your friend "subscriptions" (i.e., for each friend to show only posts with particular tags, or hide posts with particular tags) which I imagine is something they can add later based on this infrastructure.