Taglocity General Discussion Forum

Just spent my first hour or so with Tagocity and I'm really impressed with the multiple classification. Like others I've been searching for an outlook plug-ins (GTD, ClearContext, ...) that would enable me to manage my email - actioning and searching. I have a +50 habit to control.

Restrictions of folder systems just don't work in practice. Consequently, I have one big heap InBox system and need to rely on sorting and indexed searching (I've found Yahoo Desktop the best so far).

I'm not sure if single word tags are a conscious decision or a technical restriction (I hope the first). I was also looking for a classification schema (taxonomy), but again this could be a KISS decision. I did quickly work out a compromise with the TagAction (set other Tag) e.g. if I have tags for all my customer names, I can automatically assocaite them with a generalise 'Customer' tag.

Not had a chance to apply the Auto tagging yet, need to set up my tags first and let the AI try and figure out some patterns ;-).

I see manual tagging process (adding intelligence) to be part of a human thinking process (it should make you think), the bi-product being some really useful hooks that you can leverage later. However, I expect that the AI can help with some of the burden as I believe the mixture of the two approaches make for the best solution.

I have a lot of resonance with David's comments about helping to provide context on travelling tags - a very high level precise - my CEO has an attention span of a 2 year old.

The alias approach on travelling tags also shows a lot of thinking through the subject.

I can also see that generating search folders can also be used to create different perspectives.

I've found a couple of potential bugs but will report these separately.

I'm looking forward to apply and using Taglocity.

Thank you Graham - it's really encouraging to read how you are finding the Beta 2.

As you can imagine, I like talking about this kind of stuff, so here's some comments:

- I too am a 'Folder Implosion' person in that I used to set up a complex hierarchy of folders only to see them 'age' badly. Nowadays I tend to have a few folders, but they are more like 'uber tags' and mainly just for my mental satisfaction of dragging them in now and again, i.e. 'Folders Not Considered Harmful'.

- Very conscious decision about the single word tag setup. We've had a few requests for longer tokens, but that's mainly when people don't click with then 'it's nice to put a few on' mentality. I often see each tag like a 'perspective' on the item.

- Taxonomy and hierarchy got a lot of thought, but most features we punt out nowadays are more based on 'it should emerge as an idea in itself' kind of thinking. Maybe later on. We did play with some online taxonomy services for automatic aliasing, but mainly because the tech was fun - we're waiting to see if peoples tags actually need it.

- Autotagging is quite fun, in that if select some emails in any folder and then toggle off/on the 'AutoTag' button on the toolbar it will force a 'classification score'. I often use them to see how the training is going.

- We talk a lot (internally) about different 'types' of tags, and some early patterns are emerging. We find that 'noun' based tags (ProjectAcme, CustomerBeta) are good for AI, as their content is enough to trigger classification - while conversely the 'verb' based tags (DoIt, PanicNow) are best as 'TravelingTags' or just Manual. This split is really interesting to us as we've approached the 'automatic' helper natural of tagging from different approaches - and it is working well so far.

- Very glad you picked up on the 'context' message. We are finding a lot of people like the more visual stuff (TagCloud etc) or the AI. For me, the 'collaborative' tagging is one of the most interesting areas of Taglocity.

Thank you again for the comments, it's gratifying to hear what people are thinking.

On the topic of different types of tags, I've noticed that some of my tags are temporal, while others are much more permanent.  Travelling tags associated with a particular email thread may be very short term, and never used (or at least assigned to an item) again.  Project related tags will be used extensively during the project, but then fade away.  Other tags, like the ones I have for each software product we have will live and be used much longer.    On this line of thought, a good optional sort order for the tagCloud might be by "time since last assignment" (and/or "time since last use" in the search panel).