[uf-discuss] hCa* CATEGORIES as TAGS

[Benjamin Carlyle]

Hello,

On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 21:27 -0800, Chris Messina wrote:
> On 11/22/05, Brian Suda <brian.suda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > My question is this: Can we consider the property CATEGORIES inside a
> > vCard and/or iCalendar file, equivalent to a rel="tag"? or should we?
> ...I might use the category "Smells like fish" on my blog
> for peculiar news stories yet I'll tag the posts with "news",
> "government" and "george bush". (Aren't you glad I didn't use an hCard
> example?)
> In that case, if you were to try to suggest that the category usage is
> parallel with the tag use, I might take umbrage. Quite obviously,
> "Smells like fish" isn't a semantic way to describe the content.

I'm not sure that's exactly so. Personally I very much use tags and
categories to mean the same thing in my writing. I think it somewhat
follows in the vein of "humans first, machines second" to bring the
semantic and the presentation together.

I already categorise my blog posts for my users, so I don't want to add
technorati tags. I just want the categories I use to be available for
technorati users to search. I'm suspect I'm at odds with a number of
readers of this mailing list when I say that I find producing a list of
tags at the bottom of each blog post ugly and distancing. If you wanted
your post to be associated with those tags, why didn't you structure
your site's categorisation in the same way? I suspect that if the
information isn't useful to users browsing your pages then it isn't
really something that should be visible to them, and perhaps should not
exist at all.

I would also suggest that "Smells like fish" is just as semantic as any
other tag you might want to apply. Just because a term is human friendly
and perhaps even humourous doesn't necessarily mean that it can't be
useful to machines as well.

You may be right. The two may be different. I just don't see everyone
taking that same point of view.

-- 
Benjamin Carlyle <benjamincarlyle at optusnet.com.au>