I came to this post because i got bored wasting my time crawling accross my folders. As an -amateur- dancer, i’ve got a huge collection of short dancing videos. If i decide to work on one kind of move and its variations, i can end up by looking to as less as 5 or so vid amomg a ton.
What is the solution ? Create a ridiculously long hierarchy like /Dance//Arm Move/Spin_for_the_lady_at_the_end and so on ?????? and then spend hours trying to find the 10 i want (and which could be in 10 different folders because it’s mainly freestyles so that means you could have at least 3 different but interesting moves in them) ?

Pffff, i’d rather watch the video, put it in one folder and add the tags so i can find it in one second when needed.

Think of it like an address book. For one contact, have you got a field that collapse its name + phone number + postal address and so on ? No.
But still, if you dial the number, the phone souldn’t it recognize it and say ok, your trying to reach Mr XXXXX ? Sounds natural no ? The same goes for your files IMHO.

Another beef with filing/tagging is that that when your tag list gets long, the meta is actually more cumbersome than the data it’s supposed to organize. I don’t know why this has not yet happened, but why can’t we search/sort tags as quick as we can search/sort email messages?

Desktop Search is awesome. I use X1 and I’ve abandoned using folders in Outlook completely (see http://www.cnxn...rsTutorial.html ). Search has no up-front cost like filing does and these days it’s lightning quick. That said, there are some limitations to it.

Search is excellent for finding one thing (message, file, whatever), however it’s terrible for grouping many things easily, unless you’re an SQL guru. For my company I have many an emailed receipt and bill for things I order online and some contain the word “order”, some “bill”, some “receipt” or something else. At the end of the year when we’re filing the corporate tax return it would be nice if I could just click on one tag to find them all so I can send them to my accountant.

Search is also excellent if you know what you’re looking for, however it falls short if you don’t but will know when you see it. Sometimes I can’t put my finger on a key word (or a contextual key word is not contained in the message) so it would be nice to be able to browse a list until something jogs my memory.

So the key here is to make tagging EASY. No one is going to tag if it’s more difficult than using their folders or if the pain of tagging is greater than the pain of a complex search query. And who wants to duplicate in tags what they’ve already done with folders? It would be nice to mirror anything done with folders in the tags. So if I file it in A\B\C it will automatically be tagged with A, B, and C.

The closest thing I’ve found that melds the 2 worlds of Tagging and Search is a product called SideFinder (www.sidefinder.net). I tried out the Beta which currently has a very limited feature set and is a bit buggy, but they are definitely headed in the right direction and are close to a second beta release. It solves (and will solve) the above problems as follows, albeit for Outlook 2003 email only at the moment.

When selecting messages, it shows related tag(s) in the sidebar. In this way you can select a block of messages in an approximate date range, locate the desired tag filtered in the sidebar, and then select the tag to display the related messages. It’s bilateral file navigation – use the meta to find the data, but also use the data to find the meta – Search/Sort to find one message and use SideFinder to find the rest. A good analogy is “Stumbleupon” to find messages. Nothing else that I know of enables this.

If you’re a big Search proponent like I am, you may find this feature interesting – Nameless Tagging. We often know that 2 (or more) messages are related somehow, but we can’t easily think of a meaningful name. SideFinder will allow you to drag a message to a message to create a relationship between them via a default UID. Using the bilateral file navigation described above, you need only find one message to find the rest. This eliminates one of the biggest problems with meta – the mental effort and time to create meaningful names.

The best thing about SideFinder is that is does not f*%@ with the Outlook UI. It’s a nice little sidebar that interacts with the application but does not change it. This is what killed NEO (Nelson Email Organizer) for me. Nice product but far too complex and it made me relearn everything I already know. Not only that, I had to give up some great features in Outlook which could not be duplicated in NEO so the trade off was too costly.

Search is still king for me, but if SF works the same as it does in Outlook for files in Explorer and web favorites in IE and Firefox like they say it will, I’m sold. Finally unified categories for all apps without changing the UI’s that I know and love.

TechCrunch has an informative post about Tag2Find, basically tagging files o your PC…also see Stored Tagging File Utility.
Mike explains that Vista has a tagging component but it is not very prominent. Tag2Find lives in your systems tray, click…

Tagging is all the rage these days, so it’s not surprising something like Tag2Find has been developed. Tag2Find is an application for Windows that lets you tag any kind of file and search for it.
I’m not sure what I think of this app. On on…

I haven’t played with Vista’s built-in tagging too much but it looks pretty good at first glance.

It isn’t polished by any means, but its free, works well, and seems to do almost everything (if not everything) that “Tag2Find” does. There is GUI support for Windows and command line support for any OS that can run PHP (although we don’t provide those packages on the site). http://jade.mso...PosterFinal.pdf for a quick overview of functionality. Our program is also file-system independent, whereas Tag2Find requires NTFS.

To OS X users: Spotlight’s “tagging” leaves a lot to be desired.

Tagger..beware

BTW, what exactly is the purpose of of these comment forms always requiring an E-mail when anyone can type inf anything. What the heck is the point?

Currently, we are working to improve the private beta and we will take every posts, emails and comments serious. Because, it is important to see the different opinions to learn from them.

Thank you!
tag2find team