Guidelines followed in Dekoh tag implementation

Posted on February 22, 2007 by Vijay
Filed Under Analysts, Product Insights, Product Comparison.

Here are some key rules Dekoh tagging tool follows:

1. Smell tags where you can. Tagging is certainly an extra bit of work and we tend not to do it, unless we are very disciplined type. So, the interface for tagging should appear at carefully chosen places in the user interface of the application. User needs to be suggested with tags, where possible. Example, tags for photo, can be derived from its file name or folder name. Tags can also be derived from metadata stored media files, such as EXIF/IPTC/XMP in JPEG photos, ID3 in MP3 music, and so on.

2. Don’t get selfish making tags proprietary application data.Since tagging takes time and effort, it is very natural for user to expect that this tagging effort is not lost. It is even better if the same tags can be read by other applications (non Dekoh) as well. Dekoh saves tags in a standards based (EXIF/IPTC/ID3) way into the media files. Your tag information always stays in the file and should be readable by all other applications.

3. Tag Cloud should provide different mechanisms to visualize, than just plain vanilla font-size variation. Tag Cloud can be used for navigation, an alternative to search. User may not remember the exact tags associated with the object. So we provided various ways to view tags to select, sort and filter the tags that should show up in the tag cloud:
- Show tags used: Last month, Last week, Last 24 hours, or All time
- Show how many tags: 25, 50, 100 or All
- Show tags based on usage: Most used, Least used, Newest, or Oldest
- Sorting order: A-z or Z-a
- Show with frequency of occurrence
- Show as: Cloud or list (sometimes it is simply easy to locate in a list)
- And a few styling options: remove coloring, remove varying text size, change to new style sheet

4. Provide powerful management of tags.Tagging could pretty much become useless, unless tags are managed well. Users want to change misspelt tags, too many similar tags (say plurals) and infrequently used or less useful tags (dead wood). We had to provide easy ways for users to add, rename, merge and delete tags, so that they can manage their tags well. I guess some people have called this as Tag Gardening; I like that.

See the Live Demo of Tag widget. This is pure javascript library and you can use it in your applications. Read more and Download including source here. We would love to hear your experience. Post a comment on this blog or send an email feedback@dekoh.com.

Vijay

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