ClayShirky posts on Many2Many about tags (current hype word: folksonomy) and hierarchies. ¹
One day the concept of creativity can be a subset of a larger category, and the next day it can become a slice that cuts across several categories. In hierarchy land, this is a crisis; in tag land, it’s an operation so simple it hardly merits comment.
The move here is from graph theory (arrange everything in a tree graph, so that graph traversal becomes the organizing principle) to set theory (sets have members, and the overlap or non-overlap of those memberships becomes the organizing principle.) This is analogous to the change in how we handle digital data. The file system started out as a tree graph. Then we added symlinks (aliases, shortcuts), which said “You can organize things differently than you store them, and you can provide more than one mode of access.”
I still wonder whether splitting incoming mail into folders is a good idea. I think we need mail processing that assigns *tags* and allows to quickly and efficiently perform set operations on them.
#Web
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Interesting thought. Hacking something in gnus to do this? :D
– AadityaSood 2005-01-25 12:34 UTC
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I think RMAIL is already tag-based. Dunno how good its “automatic tagging” facilities are, however.
– Alex Schroeder 2005-01-25 13:18 UTC
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I don’t know about RMAIL but VM has virtual folders which do the kind of thing you are looking for.
Also google mail categorization is done by adding labels, you can apply these labels via filters or by hand. (if somebody wants a gmail invitation just send me an e-mail pierre.gaston papaki gmail.com)
– PierreGaston 2005-01-25 15:26 UTC
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Currently I’m fetching my kensanata@gmail.com mail via POP3 (and flushing it on the server). I think I will stop this and see whether I like the label stuff.
– Alex Schroeder 2005-01-25 23:15 UTC
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Hmm it seems also that Thunderbird has something like this via Save Search Folders Never tried ...yet.
– PierreGaston 2005-01-26 19:55 UTC