Can a tag have a ‘spin’? I’ve spent a lot of time tagging lately, and have found that I need a way to reflect positive/negative spin on items I’m tagging. For example, I was looking through my tags (and others) for items that labeled “ajax”, and specifically for items that focused on the problems or shortcomings of AJAX.  I wish I had tagged all my ajax resources with something like this: “ajax+1” for positive articles, “ajax-1” for negative articles, “ajax” for “no-spin”. Or maybe, “-ajax”, “+ajax”, and “ajax” would be a cleaner syntax. As a long-time C++ programmer, I like “ajax++” and “ajax- -” a lot, too.

In any case, it seems too fine grained to split my AJAX tags up into “ajax” and “negative”, “ajax” and “positive”, etc. That sort of works, but breaks down when multiple tags get involved. If I read an article on the realized virtues of AJAX and the perceived weaknesses of ASP 2.0, here’s what I might add for tags using my typical approach: “ajax”, “pos”,  “asp20”, “neg”. Fine.  But now when I want to pull up articles that are “detractors” of AJAX, what do I get? I get this article too, if I search for items tagged “ajax” “neg” – both of those tags were attached to this article, even though it was a pro-AJAX – anti-ASP article. The current tagging model has no way to bind “ajax” and “neg” together logically, and that’s what I’m really looking for.

Of course, problems arise from my idea for tags like “ajax++”.  First, the search function would have to be made aware. It hardly helps to tag articles with “ajax++” and “ajax—“ when the tag search won’t let me pull them up when I just want to look for “ajax” tags.  I’d need the search tool to understand something regular-expression-ish like “ajax*”, where the ‘*’ character serves as a wildcard for any “spin” suffixes. That’s not a significant problem, though, as tag searching is still just getting off the ground, and from a technical standpoint it’s trivial to support it. Whatever syntax is used will have a crowding effect on the tag namespace, however. For example, in the case I’m using above, if I wanted to tag technical articles related to the C++ programming language, the tag search function would think I was trying to retrieve items tagged “C” – the predecessor language, that had a positive spin on the subject.  There are ways around this too, but these seem inevitably to end up with really geeky regex-like formulations. I’m looking for a simple way to put positive or negative spin on a tag.

Second, if this is a good idea at all, then the idea of supporting just positive and negative spin probably too narrow. Instead, we’d need some kind of “qualified tag” system that provide more general semiotics for tags. For example, I might use a syntax like “ajax.pro” and “asp.anti” above. “pro” and “anti” here would still be tags, in the sense that I could search for items tagged “anti” (or maybe “*.anti”?) and find articles tagged “asp.anti”. Note that I’m not suggesting this a way to assign taxonomical or ontological labels – existing tags do that already: I can label something with a tag like “Computers: Internet: Web Design and Development: Promotion: Search Engine Optimization Firms”, if I’m patient enough to type all that in, or have a tool that will let me quickly browse and choose DMOZ nodes for tags. This isn’t about topical classification, but rather about a property I find increasingly useful when I want to create and retrieve tags – advocacy for or against, or neither.  That’s often a subjective distinction, but these are my own tags after all.

On the other hand, I’m aware that one of the keys to tagging catching on was it’s stark simplicity. If the IETF had created a working group to formalize a tag specification, you’d probably be able to write small games with the syntax provided, but no one would be using it, at least in the way del.icio.us tagging has taken off. Still, as I invest more time tagging things I read an work with – really just advanced bookmarking – I’m losing information I’d like to preserve at the point where I add tags. It’d be nice to have a simple way to “micro-tag” my tags.