I Heart Tags
Tuesday, February 1, 2005Allow to me to wax nerdy here for just a moment and declare that I love metatags. Sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, and now even Metafilter, are embracing user-created tags, or keywords, to organize content by type—not through hierarchical categories, but through organic tags. Want to find popular bookmarks related to both design and sex? No problem. Photographs of bananas? Done. Metafilter posts about David Hasselhoff? Er… why not!
This Wired article refers to this new form of information architecture as “folksonomy”. I think tagging is extremely powerful because it’s a form of organization that removes any sense of system and order in favour of something far more intuitive, flexible, and social.
I use Del.icio.us now for all my bookmarking partly because I want to access the same bookmarks from multiple machines, but also because tagging allows for more powerful organization and searching than assigning links to individual categories. And maybe I’m just a geek, but this kind of social systematics is just fun. And the Del.icio.us inbox is amazing—it allows you to “subscribe” to tags, so anytime another user tags one of their bookmarks with a tag you subscribe to, that bookmark gets put into your inbox. It’s a great way to discover new sites.
My technology wish for 2005 is to have tagging implemented into iTunes. MP3s already have their own metatags, but limiting songs to one genre tag is restrictive. What if a song is country and alternative? Soul and an oldie? Hip hop and polka? I want to be able to assign tags or keywords to my iTunes library so I can create dynamic smart playlists based not only on genre, but mood, lyrics, instrument, subject, nationality… I currently, for example, have an iTunes playlist of songs that I listened to and remind me of highschool, but I have to manually add songs to it. Why can’t I take “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and add highschool, crunchy, and DanRather tags to it?
Are you listening, Apple?
(Oh, by the way, there’s a plugin called TuneTags, but I’d prefer a real solution)
Andi says:
I use the “Grouping” field in the iTunes info to tag my tracks, then use smart playlists to group what i want across genres. Like some tracks I have are ‘tagged’ as 80s as well comedy for example…
So you could have a list that includes Country and Alternative, if you put the right info in the Grouping area.
Would be better if it also worked in the search field too though - I’m getting too used to flickr!
(Love the site btw)
-----
Robot Johnny says:
Thanks for the tip, Andi! It’s another band-aid solution, but I found This AppleScript that might help automate adding tags to the “Grouping” area. I’ll play around with it…
Feaverish says:
I second Andi’s advice. I always use several tags to identify the genre of a song in iTunes, and then make smart playlists to group them.
So, for instance, I can make a smart playlist general enough to include all songs “tagged” with, I don’t know, “indie” (which could be hundreds of songs), or one specific enough to only include songs tagged with “indie,” “scottish,” “90s,” and “dance” (I have no idea who would fit this description).
I find this works really well for now. Just make sure you turn off genres when browsing, or you’ll end up with like a thousand categories.
Oh, and you might enjoy Smart Playlists, which offers reader-submitted creative solutions to problems like this.
Robot Johnny says:
...songs tagged with “indie,” “scottish,” “90s,” and “dance” (I have no idea who would fit this description).
Looper sorta fits that description!
Feaverish says:
Hey, that’s true!
Eva says:
At least you HAVE a digital version of “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”
I have/had it on TAPE, because my friend bought that REM CD, and I copied it, while I bought “Automatic for the People” and she copied that (I got the better deal).
Nobody back then warned us, poor unsuspecting music copiers, that our illegally copied tapes would not be compatible with illegally copied MP3s ten years later! (ten!?! Old!)
If someone in 1995 had said: “Listen kid, don’t copy that on tape! You won’t be able to import tapes to iTunes when that comes around and you’ll regret it!” that would have made a much bigger impression than some lame explanation about money and the music industry. Oh, the irony!
Alex says:
To be honest, metatags (or metadata, to be precise, which are more or less the same) are already built into iTunes: it’s from this feature that Apple decided to create Spotlight (or so they said
.
To be able to make use of them, just select the song, hit Cmd+I, go to the ‘Info’ tab and insert into the ‘Comments’ field all the tags you like. Then, make a search or create Smart playlists based on your tags, and - as Steve J would say - BOOM! Look in awe at the power you have in your hands…
Alex says:
(by the way… hip hop and polka?!?!)
Robot Johnny says:
Yes, Alex, but the Comments field is awkward. If I want to select a range of songs and edit all their comments at once, it will erase whatever is already there instead of adding to it.
Alex says:
Well… you definetly have a point there. I usually don’t edit comments in groups, so I didn’t think about it. At least, you could take it as a partial solution without having to resort to third party software… but I agree with you: it would be good to see that function integrated in iTunes. We’ll have to wait and see…