joey said:
I see no distinction between your model and mine, other than what they're called.
i can't really say that there _is_ a difference between them, joey, not until your model is fleshed out with a real live app. in my version, a book is represented by alias files that live in various folders. the names of those folders _could_be_ considered as "tags". but that's not how "tagging systems" are generally architected, not if i understand 'em correctly. what i'm looking to create is a simple system that people can understand implicitly, and operate easily on their machines... how that system is labeled is nothing but a semantic matter, just as long as everyone understands exactly how it works. i'll give people a "starter-set" of folders, but after that, they can develop things from there according to their own aims. if they want a category called "phat books", they tell my app to create a "phat books" folder, then they start checking off the books that they want to have represented in that folder. i see this as more disciplined and restrained than tagging, where idiosyncratic tags are more-or-less routinely applied. but, you know, i guess there's nothing to stop a person from generating many folders with just one or two books in each. at any rate, it is this _personalization_ of the categorization that i see as the main difference between folders and tags. tagging systems usually operate in a social network arena. and this is perhaps an important distinction as well, in that i see my system running as an app on a person's machine. although i think people haven't been too clear on it thus far, it seems that most of you see this operating on a webserver. as an aside, y'all might want to look at ning.com for a means by which you can easily create a social-networking web-app. now, it may well be that the best start-set of folders is created via a tagging system, perhaps one that is generated on a wiki. as i said yesterday, though, i'm more interested in doing this _by_myself_, because it seems too difficult to get any helpers, and too unwieldy to build a system that captures all their help. (it's far easier to just write the program for the end-user and leverage the work that's already done in regard to cataloging. for instance, one of the first cuts will be on the _language_, and i can determine that by simply checking that in the file.) but, speaking of a wiki, i think what you would get from that would be more amenable to my "folder" structure than tags, because each "page" on the wiki would represent a "folder". at least that's how _i_ would organize the wiki. for instance, i'd have a "beatrice potter" wikipage that listed all her e-texts. and i'd have an "esperanto" wikipage listing all those e-texts. (of course, you could also organize the wiki with each page representing an e-text, and then apply the tags on the page. but i think you would find that approach to be cumbersome. again, until i can see an actual working example on your end, it's difficult for me to comment positively or negatively on it.) but since i'm doing my thing by myself, the architecture of my catalog depends on being able to collect almost all of the data _programmatically_, via computerized analysis of the e-texts. the other source of information i will use in generating the starter-set of folders is the catalog-structure richard seltzer has set up over at samizdat.com. (and, if i could recover it, i'd add the one that david moynihan had at blackmask.com.) to sum up, i don't want to spend a lot of time generating the initial catalog structure, and i don't want to spend a lot of time assigning e-texts within that catalog structure. ok? my third concern is that people can modify to their desire. there are other concerns, too, such as being able to capture any additional information that people might contribute in the long run while modifying their catalog (the arena where tags really shine), but my 3 main concerns are the ones listed. also, a main goal of the starter-set is to give end-users a way to quickly eliminate the parts of the library they do not want to have downloaded to their machine, and give the rest of it a basic structure that can be navigated easily and intuitively, and i think the "folder" model qualifies well in that regard... so yes, you might be right that the same program that can administer the folder-structure might be an equivalent of one that can administer a tagging model. or it might not. i know what my app will look like. i need to see the other. -bowerbird