British Inside : Tags

More Gmail

James — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:44:00 GMT

My daughter thinks it's funny when I talk about Gmail - she says it sounds like "super hero mail". I am of course ok with that.

I've been using it more and more recently. I've been sucking in my personal email to Gmail for a month or so and reading it there. When I went on vacation for a week I was reading it on my phone that way. Since I spend my life in a browser I find it very convenient.

I''m loving the rules and labels. It took a few days to think labels rather than folders, but just as in CMS I do prefer the use of labels. The rules ROCK. I have some important ones that forward to SMS which is sooooooo handy. Everyday I add more rules to automatically sort emails into a label and out of the Inbox.

I'm not quite sure yet if the order of rules is important; I'm stuck thinking in Outlook mode where the order is very important and liberal use of "stop processing more rules" is applied to get an email into the "right folder". Of course, this is an advantage of labels (tags) over folders (categories) - an email can be in multiple tags.

For now, Outlook is still the app that deletes my email from the server, although I find myself never checking Outlook for personal email any more so that will soon change I'm sure. I'll delete the Outlook account and ask Gmail to delete from the server as it retrieves.

Btw, did I say what a breath of fresh air search is in Reader and Gmail? So nice. I haven't been able to (effectively) search in Outlook for some time now.

Calendar's is the one thing that is holding me back - I'm using outlook for personal use too and that is integrated into my phone via Exchange. I read yesterday via Matt Cutts that there is finally Google-Outlook integration but I haven't looked at it yet. If that's true, if I can get Google Calendar to appear on Outlook and my phone then I'm moving over to that too.

(Yeah I know there are 3rd party apps that do the integration, but I always figured that Google would do it so I waited)

Integration is the key I'm finding - just like we all thought Office was integrated, now I'm ~~getting~~ hooked into my Google Account. Everything fun is in there - all my webmaster tools, analytics, reader, gmail, adsense, adwords, base, notebook, bookmarks. Wow, when I list how much of my life is in Google's hands...

Categories, Tags and Folksonomy

James — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:45:00 GMT

Someone just asked where categories went in CS 2.1. Although many people picked up via blogs and forums that categories were morphed into tags, others didn't get the memo. The 2.1 announcement didn't specifically point this out either.

Regardless, I just realized that I had never posted the link that changed my mind forever on categorization.

Here it is: Ontology is Overrated.

I can't believe I hadn't posted that before. I meant to, years ago. LOL, it was recorded in March 2005!! Those of you that miss categories, listen to this mp3 first. Me? Even after 18 months of writing an extensive category system in Dozing Dogs CMS, I am totally committed to Tags as the way to go.

My favorite quote from that talk:

It isn't ideas that have to be in one place mainly; an idea can be all over the place. It is a book that has to be one place.

While I'm browsing my old Tags bookmarks, here are two related gems from that era:

React Quickly

James — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:32:40 GMT

Lately I've noticed another acceleration in the speed that things happen. I'm not a johhny-come-lately, but today I feel like a rabbit sticking his head out of the ground and watching all these flying rocket-cars whooshing by.

=- Whoosh!

Did you see that?

How fast do you react to new trends?

Example 1: Domainers.

Did you know there were people out there buying domains for millions of dollars? Did you know that good domains earn thousands of dollars each DAY from a simple landing page just showing Google/Yahoo/Whoever ads? Did you know that it's virtually impossible now to register a domain with one or two words from the dictionary? People are professionally writing and running programs to do nothing but register new or expiring domains and then creating pages with google search results as content on them?

You didn't? This is old news. Great domains are as rare as rocking-horse poop now. Earlier this year I went on the hunt for a replacement worldclass domain name for OurLittleNet - I think I found one too, but it took me around 100 hours. I tell you, trying every possible combination of words you like and synonyms of those words can take a while. Every. Single. Example. Was. Taken.

Except one, which I bought and who knows I may even use next year.

Don't wait even one more day; the .com space will soon be closed, full, done. Unless you want to be called www.scrooncher.com or www.whikler.com (LOL, even my first three make-up names were taken!!)

Example 2: AdSense

Everyone is using it, right? But do you know how quickly the big boys react to current events?

Seth posted the story today called A New York minute - companies have ads up for "New York Strike" already. Hilarious, like www.GoToMyPC.com who say "Forget the strike, Telecommute from home by accessing your office PC".

That's clever marketing. Is your company's marketing department doing that sort of stuff? That fast?

Example 3: Some Ideas Are More Than Just Buzzwords

Web 2.0. Yes, everyone is sick of it.

But what about Tag Clouds? Folksonomies? Do you understand what makes the following sites/technology interesting?

43 Things, del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Suggest (although I saw Scott do it first), NewsGator, Technorati, The Working Network, Wikipedia

Personally I think Folksonomies are really interesting; far more than AJAX. Sorry Wally. Categorization is something I've spent many man-months on over the last few years, but I've never been totally happy with the results, even with related categories and other cool stuff. Users just don't like having to find a pigeonhole.

Which is why tags are such a very interesting alternative. In hindsight I was very close to getting there with my Alphabetized Category descriptions. Who knew?

Never mind. I'm catching up quickly and have some great ideas for extending the tag idea. :D