[Developers] Blog properties and ping idea

[Robert Cook]

This is right -- topics and tags should really be the same thing.   
Tags are degenerate in at least two ways:

1) They are just strings in a single namespace.  That is, you can  
only have one tag name "Joe", but there may be many distinct topics  
with that label.

2) Tags can be about locally-relevant things like "to do" or "funny",  
whereas topics should have a more global meaning.

I believe that tags with the disambiguation benefits of Topics  
described in #1 would be better.  As for #2, users won't have a  
custom view as they do on Flickr or delicious, so everybody would be  
sharing "to do" in the Freebase UI.  This would remove the incentive  
to create such tags, or compel somebody to create a better UI that  
shows only a single user's tags.

R

On Aug 21, 2007, at 12:13 PM, Christopher R. Maden wrote:

> Tim Kientzle <tim at metaweb.com> wrote:
>> In Freebase, a "tag" is just a degenerate "type" with no properties.
>> Anyone can already create personal types ("tags") and attach them to
>> Freebase topics in any way they like.
>
> Hmm — I actually think of tags as being more like degenerate  
> *topics*.  A blog post associated with the tags freebase, metaweb,  
> open data, and cool toys seems like it would be mappable to an  
> instance of blog post, associated with the topics Freebase,  
> Metaweb, Open data, and Cool toys (some of which might be new  
> topics with no more specific type).
>
> ~Chris
> -- 
> Christopher R. Maden
> Data Architect
> Metaweb Technologies, Inc.
> <URL: http://www.metaweb.com/ >
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