Get Up 8

Wishlist

'Tis the morning of Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring, except me and the cats—actually, that's most of the creatures—all the creatures were stirring except Barbara, who's still having visions of sugarplums.

Instead of sugarplums, I had a dream last night about a method for tagging blog entries. Every concept used as a tag should have at least two aspects, one more general, one more specfic. For example, to tag an item christmas, the item would receive the tags holiday and christmas. To add the tag season, one might use season and winter. Each tag is an orthogonal axis, and receives several more or less general points along that axis. I don't know if this is a terrible idea or not, but I suspect I should probably read more about taxonomies before I present my recently invented round-thing that I've decided to call the wheel.

I'm intrigued by the way F-Spot uses a tree structure to organize tags. If you have a tag Places, and under that tag, you add a child, Nebraska, and under that, another, Lincoln, when you add the Lincoln tag to a photo, it automatically and transparently behaves as if it also has the Places and Nebraska tags. That seems like a cool approach, though it makes adding a new tag a little more cumbersome: it requires that the tree structure be edited whenever a new tag is added, to put the new tag on the correct branch of the tree. Also, photos exported to flickr only receive the leaf tags. I'm not sure, yet, if that's a bug or a feature.

All that is just a digression from the actual subject of this post, which was intended to be a set of Christmas wishes, two front teeth style. So without further ado, here are a few things I'd like to find under the tree this morning.

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 09:44