InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Paul_J_Miller on 2019/01/09 05:15

There is an interesting aricle on the Zettelkasten Blog about Tagging and it is well worth a read.

Basically what they are saying is, don't make your Tags too general and try to pick out things which differentiate articles (items) rather than things which group them together.

Enjoy ! :)

Comments

A very worthwhile read to stir ideas about good tagging methods. I do have to say the author is quite skilled at making something simple more complex than it needs to be. I'll bet he's an academic of some type.

[quote=David_H]

I do have to say the author is quite skilled at making something simple more complex than it needs to be. I'll bet he's an academic of some type

[/quote]

LOL !

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

It's almost maddening. He writes the entire article and never actually just gives a concise example, and is so obtuse that the first 4 article commenters are telling him they don't understand the distinction he's making. He then responds "I implicitly presupposed some metaphysics." Hilarious!

He does give the example of diet, admittedly it is not clear or concise but I think I know what he means. Choose Tags which will illustrate the differences between things not just general categories which will tend to return too many hits.

The article about structure notes is also interesting, I think in InfoQube 'Home Pages' could easily fulfill this role but I must admit I do not use 'Home Pages', for me these are still a feature looking for a purpose.

The thing is, he doesn't have Infoqube to work with ;-). The tagging system in IQ allows me to break some of his rules with no downside. As an example, let's same I'm filing 3 articles on tilt-shift lenses, which relates to photography. One is a review, one a tech article, and one a link to a lens I'm interested in buying. Using his method I'd probably have to create tags such as:

#tilt-shift-buy for the article about the lens I want to buy.

#tilt-shift-knowledge for the tech article

#tilt-shift-review for the review

Each of those tags are pretty specific, though obviously I might want to add some additional tags to further refine things. But the problem I see with this method is you will end up with thousands of tags, many of them totally unnecessary.

Using IQ I can instead use a fairly specific "object" tag as he calls them, (i.e. tilt-shift) with broad attribute tags (review or knowledge or buy) that are meaningful to me.

#tilt-shift #buy for the article about the lens I want to buy.

#tilt-shift #knowledge for the tech article

#tilt-shift #review for the review

With the method above you'll need a fraction of the number of tags you'd need to be highly specific, without giving up anything. So with my method the key is to use a fairly specific "object" tags and broad "attribute" tags that are meaningful to you. And I'm guessing most people won't need more than 25 attribute tags.

That is true and also I have found that having a hierarchical tagging system you can make a heirarchy of tags where each level refines the previous level going from general categories at the top to specific concepts at the bottom.

But even without this you have a very valid point that combinations of tags can be used to narrow the search.

Very interesting post for me - haven't actually tried tags at all, but I can see them being useful with this approach. I seem to still be stuck in 'outliner hierarchy' thinking mode. Thanks for sharing!