Simpy Chichimichi

Nothing about Simpy here, move along. That is, unless you are interested in a little rant about "Web 2.0" and friends.

Over at TechCrunch Mike and Keith have a nice list of "Web 2.0 terms": long tail, web 2.0, Ajax this, Ajax that, and so on. The list is actually from this year's Foo Camp, via The Web 2.0 drinking game.

It's a list of terms and phrases that I learned to hate. The terms themselves are not the cause of my feelings towards them; it is this echo chamber of Blogosphere (another nice word), where everyone who wants to appear as an in person blogs simply echos catchy terms and phrases heard elsewhere. I often get a feeling people regurgitate these terms, without even fully understanding what is it that they are regurgitating.

But I feel there is another very big Web 2.0 term: embrace. Nowadays people and companies no longer implement or support or adopt technologies and concepts, they embrace them. So now we have companies that embrace folksonomies, podcasting, RSS feeds, and so on. There is nothing wrong with the word embrace itself, it is being used properly in this context (see it in this English dictionary), it is just that I can't stand this "terminology fashion". Now watch me go Web 2.0 buzzword-happy in the next post...

The other day I blogged about WordPress Support for Posting to Simpy. This allows anyone reading your WordPress blog to save your post into their Simpy account.

But wouldn't it also be nice to get WordPress to automatically save your new blog posts into your Simpy account?

Aleksey Gureev, a BlogBridge developer, was kind enough to add Simpy support to WordPress, by extending his Bookmarker Plugin.

This means that, if you have a WordPress-powered blog, you can have all your new blog posts automatically published in Simpy. This is big! This means you no longer have to manually add your blog posts to Simpy after publishing them - it happens automatically.

Aleksey's Bookmarker Plugin download and installation steps are here. Thank you, Aleksey!

In the last post I showed how you can easily search your Simpy bookmarks directly from your Mozilla or Firefox browser. But Simpy also offers Notes, which are also taggable and searchable, so it would be nice to be able to search them directly from the browser, too.

If you are a Firefox/Mozilla user and want a quick way to search your Simpy bookmarks from the browser without having to explicitly visit www.simpy.com, here is what you can do.

1. Search your Simpy links and bookmark (in your browser!) the resulting page.
2. Open that bookmark's Properties dialog window in your browser. You should see a dialog similar to the following screenshot:



3. Edit the Location field to make it look like the field in the above image.
4. Edit the Keyword field to make it look like the field in the above image. I use "sy" keyword, but you can enter anything you like (e.g. "s" or "simpy" or ...)
5. Save your bookmark changes and try it out! Use your Keyword shortcut and enter some search terms in your browser's Location field. In the screenshot below I entered "sy blogs", which will search my Simpy links for the term "blogs".



6. Obviously, you can go all the way, and use more complex queries directly in your browser, as shown in the following screenshot.

Enjoy!

Martin from TipMonkies just added "Post to Simpy" to his WordPress-powered blog. I asked Martin to describe how he did it, and here is what he said, slightly paraphrased:

Here's the "Post to simpy" code:

<a href="http://simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?title=<?php the_title() ?>&href=<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="Post to Simpy">Post to Simpy</a>

Pretty straightforward, really. You could use & instead of &amp; but then the page won't end up as valid XHTML so that's why I replaced that. Other variables (like notes for example) could be added to the link, but would require some extra work on the blogging software's side which is why they're not included. I suppose adding tags is possible as well but I, for example, don't use the same tags on TipMonkies as I do on del.icio.us though (I have much more precise tags on bookmarking sites, as can be seen here for example.)

Tagging as we know it started with link tagging, followed by photo tagging, and quickly took off. Since then, the world has been going crazy and drooling over tagging, folksonomies, and social software and services.

Some thought or still seem to think that you can just slap tags to any type of information and any type of software, and all of a sudden they would become oh so much better. Thus, we now have dating services with tags, video with tags, audio with tags, and so on. Some of these services are a success, and their use of tags makes them more useful.

Tags are indeed a nice "innovation" - they lend themselves to easy input, easy (re)organization, they (can) improve information discovery and navigation, can be employed as filters and thus help with information overload (note how this conflicts somewhat with information discovery aspect of tags).

However, tags are not a panacea! Just because you can make something taggable, it does not automatically mean it makes sense to do so, and it does not magically increase its usefulness.

Take, for instance, Tagzania, described on the site as "Tagzania is about tags and places. If you register and log in, you can add places, points, to create and document your maps. When you add a point, you may tag it with keywords. That way, Tagzania is not only a place to build and keep your own maps, shared territories are created as well.". The service was started in July 2005 and people blogged about it like mad! But where is Tagzania now, a month after its launch? According to Alexa, it's nowhere.

How come? Tagging places makes sense, doesn't it? Hm, does it? For whom? Yourself or others? Remember, while tags are simple and easily applied, they still require time and effort. Most people are selfish (I try to be realistic). Now ask yourself: How often do I need to tag a place I know? How often in my daily life do I encounter a new place? For most of us, the answer will be not often. How often then will I go to Tagzania to tag a new place? Rarely. If I don't use Tagzania very often, will I remember to visit it when I visit a new place? No, not me. If you know of only a few dozen places, do you really need to tag them? I don't. I can remember them all and can look them up by name.

When considering adding tagging to your service or application, ask yourself some of the above questions. Tags don't always make sense.

People sometimes ask me how Simpy is different from del.icio.us beyond the obviously prettier UI. Here is my answer to one such question from last night:

> Why is Simpy better than del.icio.us? It isn't nearly as ugly, but is that all?

Oh, no, the nice UI is just something that a lot of people comment on.

The other advantages of Simpy over del.icio.us that people like is the ability to actually find something in Simpy once you tag and save it. That is because Simpy provides full-text search, just like Google or Gmail. You can search any of the fields (titles, tags, nicknames, annotations), but also the indexed full-text content of your bookmarks. With Simpy you can use all Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), +, and - to require and prohibit search terms, you can use phrase and fuzzy queries, etc. When you have a few hundred or few thousand links saved, this is an absolute must if you want to be able to find something you saved month or years ago. Del.icio.us only lets you "search" for tags, and only lets you combine tags (foo+bar), calling it a tag intersection, when in fact it's just a conjunctive (AND) Boolean query. You cannot exclude tags with del.icio.us, you cannot combine them, you cannot search for phrases, and so on. If my information is out of date, please let me know.

Consequently, finding a link with Simpy feels natural and a lot like searching the Web using Google or Yahoo.

You can also search anyone else's public bookmarks, which brings up private vs. public links. Simpy let's you have both public and private bookmarks, while with del.icio.us you are forced to share all your bookmarks. I won't go into detailed numbers, but a significant percentage of bookmarks in Simpy are private.

Simpy also lets you save, tag, and again full-text search free-text Notes. You can add a note via a bookmarklet, and if you've selected any text of the page, the add form will be pre-populated, which makes it super-easy to add a note.

Another nice feature of Simpy are Topics. Topics are like Inbox in del.icio.us, but while with del.icio.us you are limited to a single Inbox, with Simpy you can have multiple Topics. This is important when you subscribe to make than just a few people, and want to track people who bookmark different types of links (e.g. one set of users may be linux/KDE/open-source people, another may be people who bookmark links about blogs and RSS, another group may consist of people interested in food, nutrition, and healthy lifestyle, for example). Moreover, Topics come with Topic Filters. Topic Filters are essentially saved searches against all people in a given Topic. You can have any number of Topics, and each Topic can have any number of Topic Filters.

With Simpy people are not forced to write_tags_like_this, NorLikeThis. You can simply use multi-word tags with a comma as a separator. For example: KDE, open source, web browser, Linux

Simpy's search uses stemming, so the often cited problem of tags regarding singular vs. plural tag forms is not a problem. A search for "web browsers" will also find links tagged with "web browser", for instance.

There are other differences, advantages, but also disadvantages of Simpy. To be fair, Simpy's current feature set supports limited cross-user functionality, but that is about to change...

This post is based on my Simpy experience. Simpy is a large social bookmarking service that sees all possible flavours of category/tag/keyword/label usage.

Years have passed since people finally realized the limitations of folders, categories, and the use of hierarchical structures to organize large amounts of data, yet I still see blog posts where people contemplate tags. I hate joining the crowd that throws buzzwords around (think tagging, folksonomy, podcasting, web2.0, long tail, etc.), but here is my take on tags vs. categories vs. ... :

One can call them tags, labels, keywords, or categories, and think of them as the same thing with a different name, but it is how you use them that makes the difference.

Categories are typically used as buckets. An item could like in only one category, and categories were organized in a tree structure. Excellent if you want to browse.

Keywords are typically used to aide the retrieval by search. They simply annotate the item they are associated with.

Labels are typically used to classify items. They are similar to categories, but let you apply multiple labels to a single item.

Finally, there are tags, and those are often used in two mods: as keywords, and as labels. Different people use tags differently. I tend to use them as keywords, as I place a lot of value on being able to find my tagged data with a search, and I place less value on having cleanly organized items. The side-effect of this is that I have a lot of tags with low occurrence counts. Some may think of this as a bad thing - my tag cloud is huuuuge, but the advantage of this approach is that I can use search to quickly find exactly what I need, in my archive of 1000+ bookmarks. I don't care to group things, I care to find precisely what I need, when I need it. The Web is a mess, but you still use Google and not DMOZ, to find information on the Web. Search is the King (Kong).

Here is a question for the readers of this blog, as well as the wider community that deals with tags. This question was actually raised yesterday by a Simpy user and, wanting to hear what others think, I posted the question on the simpy-user list.

Imagine a tag such as "full-text". There are no spaces nor commas, so I think everyone will agree this should be handled as a single tag. However, should it be handled as a single token? In other words, should a search for tags "full" or "text" find items tagged with "full-text"? Similarly, should a search for "full-text" tag find items tagged with only "full" or only "text"?

What do you think?