Aren’t filenames sort of a massive collection of tags embedded in a hierarchical structure?

Of course I don’t want to manually tag everything, nor explicitly assign names/locations for every “file” in the filesystem. In some cases metadata could be doing more of that grunt work than it currently is. And I can choose to let iPhoto/iTunes create and manage their data storage hierarchies without my explicit intervention, focusing more on handling the content at a higher level of abstraction with less concern for how and where it’s stored.

One UI along the lines of what I’m thinking about is described in the metaFinder comments in “this posting.

And these articles relate to Simon’s issue that I originally replied to:

The Evolution of Bookmarking — Bookmarks, Firefox, and del.icio.us
Advanced Tagging — Hierarchical And Ordered Tags

[hope those links work; comment previewing would help here]

i agree with some of the comments on both sides about social bookmarking. i’ve tried Diigo & Magnolia but i’ve fallen back to Delicious. U can only really use one & the point about it having to be Quick & EZ & Simple holds very true.

The lack of scalability in usability with hierarchies has become an increasingly sensitive issue for me in many interfaces over the past few years. I don’t want the burden of finding specific hierarchical locations for items I think “belong” in multiple places.

I’m interested in interfaces that allow me to create more arbitrary “virtual” collections of items regardless of where they’re “physically” stored. Sometimes that may be a hierarchy, but that structure shouldn’t be so rigidly enforced (e.g. by the filesystem) that other arrangements aren’t equally and as easily possible. And deleting one of those virtual structures needn’t destroy the real data unless I explicitly want to.

Ambitiously oversimplifying, a more pervasive separation of the storage layer from the presentation layer that eventually encompasses (or replaces) the hierarchical filesystem.

Darn, I’ve digressed too deeply off topic. Higher level services like Plum seem to influencing some of the lower levels towards a kind of convergence that creates a better foundation for more generalized interface/usabiliy improvements. Contrast that with how low level stuff like the filesystem has imposed itself on traditional interfaces that some of us are outgrowing. The “file manager” interfaces are giving way to “information manager” interfaces that are more connected, flexible, usable, and scalable.

Sites like ma.gnolia and digg become really successful and gain a strong fan base because they offer unique features that differ them from del.icio.us, which one could consider the ‘core model’.

I don’t find digg to be my cup of tea because it seems to be less of a private bookmarking solution and more of a news/link aggregator. I like ma.gnolia because it allows me to save my links and lets me sign up to groups that I feel I share an interest with, and whose links I can then check when I have some free time. Of course, this approach may not suit say… a lab technician so they may choose another solution tailored for them. Sticking to the basics won’t work anymore becuase the market’s over saturated, which is why I closed my doors. Luckily in my case it was just a project and not an actual business model

I don’t go to sporting goods stores and claim fishing poles are irrelevant because I happen to buy my fish at the local market, and have no use for catching fish myself - why would you comment on a thread about social bookmarking sites, only to say that they are useless to you?! Let’s not forget that they are FREE services, if you dont use them, that’s up to you. That said, Simon offered a great list of reasons you should be willing to be imposed upon to organize your own links.

1. with these services I can access my bookmarks at home, at work, in a cybercafe….

2. I have hundreds of bookmarks. The hierarchical folder structure of IE/Firefox wasn’t really working for me - it doesn’t scale.

3. Resource discovery: I can see what interesting sites are being tagged by other people (either the crowd, or individual users whose opinions I value).