Modifying some of the taxonomies on my digital commonplace book

Spent a few minutes today cleaning up the various categories and tags within my digital commonplace book (aka website). Some of the automated methods I use as well as my general carelessness and fat fingers on mobile introduce spelling errors in some of these taxonomies. I also find that sometimes when choosing them from the pre-populated lists my website’s back end makes it more difficult to choose the canonical one when there are several there by error.

These issues tend to flatten these taxonomies out and make them much more difficult to search (or for others to be able to subscribe to reliably).

As an example, having tags “Domain of One’s Own” and “Domain of Ones Own” (with and without the apostrophe) as well as the acronym “DoOO” can be difficult or frustrating to use. Things get even more complicated when I hold the mental model that these concepts are just a sub-set of the broader idea of the “IndieWeb” or what I sometimes tag things as “IndieWeb for Education”. This is all much easier for me, but may be more difficult for newcomers to the site who know what one shorthand means, but are unaware of the others and thus miss details, references, or content that may have a lot of value for them.

I’ve cleaned up and concatenated many of these troublesome tags (roughly A-D alphabetically and other sections at random), but there’s still a lot of distance to go. There are 66 categories–some are hidden or used for programmatic purposes–and nearly 7,000 tags! The top 100 tags are used 30 or more times on the site and the second century of tags are used between 20 and 30 times each. At the long end of the tail there are about 4,000 tags with either 1 or no uses.

I’m promoting the economics tag to that of a category since it’s a topic in which I have a lot of interest and content. I also have a number of other tags related to sub-areas of economics. (If you were subscribed to this individual tag, you may want to fix your feed.) Other potential considerations for promotion included the topics of history, physics, and web development. I also noticed that there’s a tag for mathematics with 70 instances despite the fact that there’s already a category for it with 315 posts already–I’ll have to figure out how that happened and clean it up another day. And look, there’s somehow a tag for “math” too. Ugh!

I also put both the Quotes and Events categories under the parent category of Social Stream, though I plan on leaving them showing in the hierarchy–unlike some post kinds–as there are many legacy posts and likely future posts that aren’t just events I’m hosting, but events that are of interest to me in general. Naturally the more important events (to me) will appear in my RSVP posts. With any good luck courtesy of WordPress, links to the old versions should still work or redirect to the new hierarchy.

The manual or even automated effort of fixing or tweaking some of these things feels problematic, and I’m just looking at just my own website. I’m curious to delve into some research on taxonomies and folksonomies to see how something like this may be better systematized and/or automated. Of course categorizing things is somethings humans really love doing, but I’m not sure how deep down the rabbit hole it’s worth going for my own work. Besides, someone far smarter than I will likely crack the discovery nut from an IndieWeb perspective. Fortunately I can use the site search queries for several search engines to more quickly find the things I’m looking for without needing these taxonomies. So perhaps I’ll put some of the exercise off to another day by filing this in my tag.

Dividing and Conquering the IndieWeb Related Content on My Website

Both for my own benefit as well as for that of others who may be following along, I realize that I’ve been tagging a lot of material on my site with the broad category of “IndieWeb”. Some of it is definitely more significant and content rich than others, but in aggregate it may often seem like a firehose. If you’re following the community relatively closely already, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of redundant material.

As a result, and since it’s easy to do, I’m only going to categorize a much smaller segment of the richer material that I write or which is I deem to be extremely broadly appealing with the IndieWeb category. The remainder of smaller pieces by others, bookmarks, short replies, or other tangential related things (UX, UI, silos, silo quits, etc.) I’m going to use the alternate and separate IndieWeb tag.

Thus if you’re active in the IndieWeb community and only want my IndieWeb related materials then follow the category  and not the tag. If you’re not closely following the community and want everything then I recommend following the content from both the category and the tag. 

With the subtle change this may also help IndieWeb related planets like Aaron Parecki’s https://stream.indieweb.org/ or Malcolm Blaney’s https://unicyclic.com/indieweb/ pick up relevant data without needing to do heavy de-duplication for fear of spamming various channels.

In the coming days/weeks I’ll try to go back into my backlog of posts and re-categorize and re-tag things based on this general scheme.

My direct content:
Category Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/category/indieweb/feed/

Miscellaneous bookmarks, replies, other content I collect for my commonplace book, etc: 
Tag Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/tag/indieweb/feed/

The firehose of everything IndieWeb related from my site:
Category AND/OR Tag | feed: https://boffosocko.com/?s=indieweb&feed=rss2

And of course I still try to  aggregate and orient most of the important pieces in my IndieWeb Collection.

📑 Collaborative resource curation | Hypothes.is

Replied to Collaborative resource curation by Jon Udell (Hypothesis)
Recently we decided to keep better track of tweets, blog posts, and other web resources that mention and discuss our product. There are two common ways to do that: send links to a list maintainer, or co-edit a shared list of links. Here’s a third way, less common but arguably more powerful and flexible: tag the web resources in situ.
It isn’t rocket science, but as Jon indicates, it’s *incredibly *powerful.

I use my personal website with several levels of taxonomy for tagging and categorizing a variety of things for later search and research.

Much like the example of the Public Radio International producer, I’ve created what I call a “faux-cast” because I tag everything I listen to online and save it to my website including the appropriate <audio> link to the.mp3 file so that anyone who wants to follow the feed of my listens can have a playlist of all the podcast and internet-related audio I’m listening to.

A visual version of my “listened to” tags can be found at https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/ with the RSS feed at https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/

👓 Collaborative resource curation | Hypothesis

Read Collaborative resource curation by Jon Udell (Hypothesis)
Recently we decided to keep better track of tweets, blog posts, and other web resources that mention and discuss our product. There are two common ways to do that: send links to a list maintainer, or co-edit a shared list of links. Here’s a third way, less common but arguably more powerful and flexible: tag the web resources in situ.

👓 Just a Thought: How Tags Happened at Technorati | Powazek

Read Just a Thought: How Tags Happened at Technorati by Derek Powazek (powazek.com)
It's been six months since we added Tags to Technorati (where I'm Senior Designer), and as it turns out, it was a pretty big deal. So before we get too far away from it, here's the story of how it came about. From my perspective, anyway.

The page was set up to show any post that contained a link to it – in other words, if you linked to that page, then your post appeared on that page.  

Just a rehash of Refbacks? or an early implementation of Webmention?!
October 04, 2018 at 09:19AM

Some ideas about tags, categories, and metadata for online commonplace books and search

Earlier this morning I was reading The Difference Between Good and Bad Tags and the discussion of topics versus objects got me thinking about semantics on my website in general.

People often ask why WordPress has both a Category and a Tag functionality, and to some extent it would seem to be just for this thing–differentiating between topics and objects–or at least it’s how I have used it and perceived others doing so as well. (Incidentally from a functionality perspective categories in the WordPress taxonomy also have a hierarchy while tags do not.) I find that I don’t always do a great job at differentiating between them nor do I do so cleanly every time. Typically it’s more apparent when I go searching for something and have a difficult time in finding it as a result. Usually the problem is getting back too many results instead of a smaller desired subset. In some sense I also look at categories as things which might be more interesting for others to subscribe to or follow via RSS from my site, though I also have RSS feeds for tags as well as for post types/kinds as well.

I also find that I have a subtle differentiation using singular versus plural tags which I think I’m generally using to differentiate between the idea of “mine” versus “others”. Thus the (singular) tag for “commonplace book” should be a reference to my particular commonplace book versus the (plural) tag “commonplace books” which I use to reference either the generic idea or the specific commonplace books of others. Sadly I don’t think I apply this “rule” consistently either, but hope to do so in the future.

I’ve also been playing around with some more technical tags like math.NT (standing for number theory), following the lead of arXiv.org. While I would generally have used a tag “number theory”, I’ve been toying around with the idea of using the math.XX format for more technical related research on my site and the more human readable “number theory” for the more generic popular press related material. I still have some more playing around with the idea to see what shakes out. I’ve noticed in passing that Terence Tao uses these same designations on his site, but he does them at the category level rather than the tag level.

Now that I’m several years into such a system, I should probably spend some time going back and broadening out the topic categories (I arbitrarily attempt to keep the list small–in part for public display/vanity reasons, but it’s relatively easy to limit what shows to the public in my category list view.) Then I ought to do a bit of clean up within the tags themselves which have gotten unwieldy and often have spelling mistakes which cause searches to potentially fail. I also find that some of my auto-tagging processes by importing tags from the original sources’ pages could be cleaned up as well, though those are generally stored in a different location on my website, so it’s not as big a deal to me.

Naturally I find myself also thinking about the ontogeny/phylogeny problems of how I do these things versus how others at large do them as well, so feel free to chime in with your ideas, especially if you take tags/categories for your commonplace book/website seriously. I’d like to ultimately circle back around on this with regard to the more generic tagging done from a web-standards perspective within the IndieWeb and Microformats communities. I notice almost immediately that the “tag” and “category” pages on the IndieWeb wiki redirect to the same page yet there are various microformats including u-tag-of and u-category which are related but have slightly different meanings on first blush. (There is in fact an example on the IndieWeb “tag” page which includes both of these classes neither of which seems to be counter-documented at the Microformats site.) I should also dig around to see what Kevin Marks or the crew at Technorati must surely have written a decade or more ago on the topic.


cc: Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, Ian O’Byrne, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Jeremy Cherfas

👓 The Difference Between Good and Bad Tags | Zettelkasten Method

Read The Difference Between Good and Bad Tags by Sascha (Zettelkasten Method)

There are two different types of tags:

  1. Tags for topics. You use tags to group notes under a topic.
  2. Tags for objects. You use tags to group notes around an object, real or conceptual.

This is an interesting concept to think more deeply about with respect to my online commonplace book and future search.

👓 On Using Titles, Tags, and Categories | Greg McVerry

Read On Using Titles, Tags, and Categories by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
There seems to be some confusion uin #edu522 about when to add a title and when to leave a post with a title. This is the #IndieWeb the choice is utimatley yours. If a one word post deserves a title..give it one;…a 3,000 word treatsie doesn’t need it…then skip it. Best Practice Yet here is a q...
I still need to figure out how I want to structure tags for individual modules. Is it really worthile? Who would use them and how would those be used?

While I like the idea of “backstage” posts, I’m not sure that tagging them as such has as much value to me. Since my site is my living commonplace book, such a tag doesn’t have as much meaning somehow. I’ll have to think about it and figure out what I want to do there. I can see some value for syndicating out, or potentially to fellow classmates, but I’d suspect that for the volume of content I’m producing with the edu522 tag, it may not be as valuable. Perhaps in a larger class it might or one in which I was producing a much higher volume of posts? Time will tell, but some of these mechanics could be useful/valueable to think about for teachers vis-a-vis their classrooms and digital pedagogy based on expected class size and post volume as well as how they might structure their “planets”.

👓 How to Deliver Separate WordPress Category RSS Feeds | GreenGeeks

Read How to Deliver Separate WordPress Category RSS Feeds (GreenGeeks)
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a common method for content marketing. Feeds are used to share your content with RSS readers of all kinds. For example, users can connect a WordPress custom RSS feed directly to their Netvibes accounts for the latest news. But what if you have categories...

🎧 The Power Of Categories | Invisibilia (NPR)

Listened to The Power Of Categories from Invisibilia | NPR.org
The Power Of Categories examines how categories define us — how, if given a chance, humans will jump into one category or another. People need them, want them. The show looks at what categories provide for us, and you'll hear about a person caught between categories in a way that will surprise you. Plus, a trip to a retirement community designed to help seniors revisit a long-missed category.
The transgender/sexual dysphoria story here is exceedingly interesting because it could potentially have some clues to how those pieces of biology work and what shifts things in one direction or another. How is that spectrum created/defined? A few dozen individuals like that could help provide an answer.

The story about the Indian retirement community in Florida is interesting, but it also raises the (unasked, in the episode at least) question of the detriment it can do to a group of people to be lead by some the oldest members of their community. The Latin words senīlis ‎(“of or pertaining to old age”) and senex ‎(“old”) are the roots of words like senate, senescence, senility, senior, and seniority, and though it’s nice to take care of our elders, the younger generations should take a hard look at the unintended consequences which may stem from this.

In some sense I’m also reminded about Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and why progress in science (and yes, society) is held back by the older generations who are still holding onto outdated models. Though simultaneously, they do provide some useful “brakes” on both velocity of change as well as potential ill effects which could be damaging in short timeframes.