[mb-users] using folksonomy tags for personal collections/wishlists

[Bogdan Butnaru]

On 9/28/07, Robert Kaye <rob at eorbit.net> wrote:
> Finally, I'd like to undertake some UI changes:
>
> 1. As suggested above, distinguish your tags from aggregate tags.
> 2. Show the most popular aggregate tags on the artist/release/track/
> label page
> 3. Add a preference to not show tags artist/release/track/label pages
> 4. Add caching support to tags.
> 5. Add some short verbiage about folksonomy syntax below the tag box.
>
> What other UI tweaks do we need?

In view of the discussion above it should be relatively easy to see
who (ie, all those that) added a certain tag to some object. That is,
when I click on a tag now, I see what objects that tag has been
applied to. If I could also see "who tagged this [album|etc] «owned»"
(or «I like this», or anything else) right away, then as someone
suggested we wouldn't need any kind of special personal tags. (It'd
also be nice to navigate from "who tagged this album «cool»" to "what
else has this guy tagged «cool»".)

This would also open up some interesting things, similar in character
to what last.fm does: someone can write a tool to look at every
release I tagged «cool» or «sucky», look who else tagged them that way
(and assume they have similar tastes) and then look what other things
they liked to propose me things I might be interested in looking at.

Though it's a bit far removed from what MB does now, I can even see
plugins to media players that use a special «listened-#-times» tag;
each time I listen to a song the plugin would look at that song,
remove the (say) «listened-10-times» tag and add the
«listened-11-times» tag. This way we could actually do everything
last.fm does. (I'm not sure if it's possible to read the listen
history from last.fm, but if it is we could even import/synchronize
it.)

Correlating what artists/albums are commonly tagged the same ways
(including «cool» or «listened-x-times») might also allow in the
future finding similar artists (I seem to remember we needed some
improvement in that).

Note that the database doesn't need to do _anything_ to allow all
this. As long as tags can be read/set through the webservice, the
plugin to track my listening habits (if I want to) can be implemented
independently. And as long as it's relatively easy to aggregate things
every which way (we'll need indexes for every column,
tags/users/objects), the search for "similar artist/tastes" can also
be done independently (eg, via mashups or whatever). And the cool
thing is that they're also human-readable.

* * *

The point of my post (and what I suggest the discussion to go to) is
not that any of the things above are things we  necessarily _want_ to
do. What I mean is that if it's easy to navigate from who with what
tagged, and aggregate in every direction, it can open a lot of cool
possibilities in the future.

Kudos to the guys who added the tagging feature! I didn't imagine it
can get that useful the first time I heard about it.

(BTW, it would be nice to have the tags a bit more visible. Currently,
on the album view, if there is an album cover, there is a lot of space
to its left. It should be filled with a "flexible" box that is filled
with tags, in order of popularity. If the album cover is not there,
the box would collapse to a single line. We can improve from there.)

-- Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.