Carl Backstrom's Blog

Actually the first rule is probably require user login.

So I've been watching the usage on my tagging functionality, and it's not quite what I was hoping for. While I know people were applying and adding tags there was significant amount of people that were applying and adding tags just any old page, probably just to see the nifty AJAX effect I'm sure ;).

So I'm turning off the user initiated tagging, and going with an administrative tagging setup, which is basically just me adding them. I'm actually going to replace my breadcrumbs with this since I think it will be more useful.

User entered tags would work great if I required login to my application and then people could tag pages with personal tags that only they could see. And then the tag package could create tag weights based on that compared against the administered tags.

I will be allowing for voting on tags to change their weights on page but you can only vote on tags the administrator has entered.

Anyway I should have PL/SQL package that can be plugged into any APEX application to provide tagging functionality next week. I'm thinking I might make a package that contains the tagging/rating/comments functionality into ones package , configurable of course.

If course there is always my regular 40 hour to think of but this is much funner ;)

A nice article with tagging guidelines, even I don't/won't follow them all the time but is something to think about when tagging data.

http://tagamac.com/2007/07/best_practices/

Well I haven't bought into the whole Web 2.0 thing, I'm not talking about the technology part of course. I think AJAX and new RIA features are here to stay. They are excellent tools in the toolkit. I'm talking about the social networking part, I've signed up on services like facebook and such but mostly I have people that are already my friends and I have IM or email contact already, and really don't see the need to add random people but hey maybe it's just me, plus some of the hype is really starting to remind me of Web 1.0.

BUT!! I am sold on tagging, I think it's one of the most important ways of dealing with the flood of data I collect, I'm an avid del.icio.us user now , thanks Tyler , and want to tag everything. I want private tags for me and public tags for outside consumption,

I want to tag my dog , good dog or bad dog, I want to tag my nephew mohawk or sans mohawk.

Plus and most importantly I'm really pushing to include tagging into this.

So in the spirit of this , and as a simple testbed, I built a very simple tagging mechanism for the examples on my sample application.

I'm still working all the kinks especially with how I deal with weighting of tags but so far I'm pretty happy with the result.

When I'm finished this will make an nice addition to the examples on my application and hopefully help people find things they need easier. I think it's much more useful than the breadcrumbs which I will probably be removing soon.

Since I don't require logins you could game the system by voting for tags multiple times or even put in ....... lets just say nonsensical tags, but I'll be administering it since I want it to be useful people.

Well have at it.

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:136