New Tag Field

I use some tags relating to the books content and some tags relating to where the book is; "shelf" indicates I haven't read it yet, "atwork" is that it is at work, and I will start using "NIMC" for Not in my collection, for books I've read but don't own.

I can see that others also use these "administration" style of tags, but according to their own system.

Would it be possible to have two tag fields, one for content tags and one for administration tags? then only the content tags could be used in the tag cloud.

(This is a very minor wish, I'm perfectly happy to continue with the system as is)

This (public/private tags) has been discussed before, but has not happened (yet).

Interesting thought, but I don't think it will come to pass. A lot of people use a prefix character to indicate different uses for tags, which helps with alphabetically sorted lists, such as tag clouds. I use # as a prefix for series number and name, but other schemes are a lot more convoluted,

Well, I wish Tim would consider it. There is a fundamental difference between tags that are about the content of the work and tags that say something about the individual book, where it is, what condition it's in, has it been read or not.

It makes sense to connect the first type of tags to the same or similar tags in other peoples libraries, while the second type should just remain local to the user.

Tags for the work vs. tags for the book, but it's probably easier to call them public and private.

> 5

"Private", however, implies that they are hidden from others (as are "private" libraries).

I have "book" (as opposed to "work") tags that I would like others to be able to see. For example, books that I have rebound are so tagged in my catalogue. I'd like to be able to say to someone who evinced interest in my hobby, "go take a look at the books tagged 'rebound'."

Someone in a group might well suggest that others "check out my books tagged 'signed by author'."

These are "book" tags which would fall under your "private" rubric, but which are, I think, quite different from tags such as "Left bookcase, third shelf" or "parents' garage". They still have a significant social utility, even though they are not "works" tags.

I don't understand why so many are afraid of 'polluting' the tags for a work. Tags that show up for a work are based on commonality across the books and frequency for the work itself. so unless everyone but 'On bathroom shelf' for a work it won't show up and IF that happened then it would actually BE significant.

On a side note it would be nice to be able to sort my tags into groups for editing/viewing/using. such as

Subject tags
Location tags
series tags
etc.
With the groups being user definable and no set limit or a large max.

readafew: I have a fair number of obscure/untagged works, so a lot of my shelf tags do show up clearly.

C'est la vie

*nods* It's not a big deal to me... I'd prefer being able to "bundle" tags, as Tim puts it, than to have a strict designation for work/book or public/private tags.

It's true that weird tags show up for obscure works...but I imagine that's natural and not really a problem. I'm always amused when I see tags like 'read by Kira' show up when viewing a book I've read. Generally the static of obscure tags is easy enough to ignore that it doesn't really need a fix I think.

You'll notice that some tag clouds now show colors. We actually filter the tags for "personal"-ishness. It's not a failsafe thing, though. So we aren't excluding anything—just doing subtle color variations.

Can we have colored tag clouds for libraries? :)

>12 timspalding: I haven't noticed tag clouds in colors. Can you provide an example where we could see this?

>12 timspalding:

It looks like the different colors are just visible when you "show all tags." Try Life, the Universe, and Everything and click on "show all tags" below the cloud; you'll see that, for example, "time travel" is dark blue but "series" is paler blue.

>15 ellen.w:

Oh, I have seen that. When they said "colors", I was expecting a rainbow, not just different values of blue.

The gradations seem more noticeable to me in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time tags.

I don't know what I think of it, though. There are some "personal" tags that I find quite significant overall, like read vs. unread. I thought the tag cloud was fine the way it was before, but maybe I'll eventually get to like this way more.

No, it's when a tag cloud is refreshed. Seeing all tags skips the cached copy. The cached copy goes out of date either with time or the addition of a certain percentage of books since the last update. Ah, this technical stuff...

You've really done a number on usability with this. Did you think that maybe some people can't reasonably read light blue on white? 1995 all over again, HELLO WELKOM TO MI WEBSIGHT!!!!

Ahh.

I think the colors can potentially be very useful. It'll take a while to figure out what it all means.

You'll have to so something about visibility of the lighter colors ...

7> Polluting the tags has nothing to do with it, unless you mean the tags in your own tag cloud. What I'm mostly concerned about is the mess of all these different kinds of tags mixed together in one field. It's hard enough trying to keep just the subject tags listed in a hierarchical order (after all, you'd like all of your "fiction, science fiction, pern") to sort together, without throwing in place and condition tags as well.

I hope that tag bundles will help with this, but as I've heard no explanation as to what they are I'll have to withhold my judgement on that. Also, tag bundles sound like they could be a complex feature, and complex features have a history here of taking a very long time to be done, so a two tag field solution sounds like a fairly easy short term solution to me.

Upon further reflection, I have to say that I flat-out dislike the change in brightness. The lighter tags aren't really any less noticeable, so it's just distracting because there are too many different things to process. It was easy to understand big and bold, but when you add in another variable it's starting to be too much to take in at a glance.

Plus, I don't like the idea of filtering based on some flawed idea of personal-ness. The number (and therefore size) of the tags already reflects personal-ness; personal tags tend to be used less frequently, and if many people are using them, then they aren't personal. The change makes it seem that the tag data aren't good enough to speak for themselves, which seems to me to go against the whole principle of tagging.

22 > actually the size on a work is related to commonality of the tag across the site, the light/dark is the use against a specific work.

At least that's how I understand it, so they are different.

example

Sci-Fi is a common tag on LT, and it will show up fairly large on any book, however if I am the only one to tag Clinton's book with it, it will show up very light blue, however a David Brin book will have it much darker, though the same size.

23 > I don't think size is done on a site-wide basis. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has a small mathematics tag because it hasn't been tagged mathematics very many times, whereas Flatland has a large mathematics tag.

And then boldness/non-boldness, I think, is determined by how much the tag is to a applies to a particular work in comparison to other works. So tags that don't occur very much on a particular book (and so are small), but are even less frequent on the whole site, are bold. For example, Flatland has been tagged geometry only 58 times, so the geometry tag isn't as large as the fiction or mathematics tags, but when you look at the tag page for geometry, Flatland is the first book listed--so Flatland has a bold geometry tag.

And then certain tags are light (not just non-bold, but a different shade of blue) because they're deemed insignificant. Tags like fiction, read, and book club for The Curious Incident.... And this is what I have a problem with. I don't like Tim deciding for everyone that the subject tags are the ones that are important, and everything else should be ignored. I think it tells a lot about a book if it has a huge "unread" tag, for example.

I still think we should be able to make a distinction between tags that you want people to see and tags that you don't. The same way we should be able to have books that are public and books that are private (I know that is being worked on) and comments that are public and comments that are private. Tim has gone to great length to have the social networking aspect of the site have many gradations of public v. private. This is web 2.0 right? We should be able to have sophisticated privacy options. We shouldn't have to choose between all public or all private (I think LT does a good job with privacy issues, the TOS is excellent...but I think this is an important issue--one of the ones that separates a good site from a great site, and I hope LT will keep striving for more in this area.).

I think there also needs to be a way to revert all tags to dark blue/black for legibility.

I think all tags should just be dark blue, and then there could be a button for "hide non-subject tags" for the people who think that's necessary.

I rather liked the different colors, though they seem to be gone now.

But I'd like to add my support to the request for private tags.

I'm still seeing a variation in shades of blue as well as size and boldness.

The different shades are only for some works so far.

Odd. Which works have the different shades now? For a while they were on everything I looked at.