Categorizing Drupal Posts with Folksonomy Tags
I've been categorizing all of my blog posts with folksonomy tags over the last couple of days. You'll notice categories listed next to the time stamp of each post now.
This will definitely help people surf around the site more efficiently and find posts on topics that interest them.
I've decided to go with a pure folksonomy for now -- which basically means that I'm categorizing posts by typing in the tag name instead of selecting a category from a pre-determined pull-down list of taxonomy terms.
This is a lot more flexible and allows the categories to evolve natrually since I can make up new categories on the fly.
These tags are treated as the normal taxonomy within Drupal which means that you can click on the "Folksonomy" category at the top of the post, and you'll be taken to the http://www.echochamberproject.com/taxonomy/term/21 page where you can see all of the blog posts or entries that I or anyone else have categorized as "Folksonomy."
It's been interesting to observe my vocabulary evolution as I go through this process. I inevitably adopt a new term that could apply to a number of different posts and have to go back to see which posts could also apply to that tag. Jon Udell did a great screencast on language evolution in del.icio.us that shows how he deals with this -- unfortunately a lot of those shortcuts that Udell uses in del.icio.us are not implemented within the Drupal infrastructure just yet.
I'm having issues with creating new words that are very similar -- e.g. blog & blogs as two different terms that are easily interchangable. This is one of the criticisms of folksonomy. Morbus Iff's patch should provide a pop-up window to help prevent these types of duplicate taxonomy terms -- which makes me think that the patch isn't actually implemented. Something to look into...
UPDATE 6-15-05 3:00 p.m. One limitation to the folksonomy tagging feature is that the text entry can only include a total of 100 characters including spaces and commas. This means that it is probably best to keep the short tag names in order to fit more metadata into the post.
I'd like to see the maximum number of characters bumped up to 150 or 200. I wonder if this is easy enough modification for someone without much LAMP experience to change a variable in Drupal's open source code.
