Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with tagging

Tagging software for some National History Day kids?

rev- — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:50:32 -0800

Can anyone recommend software that allows basic tagging of data, such that if I say I'm interested in X, it will say, "You might also like A B ad C" because they are also tagged the same as X. The question is for a National History Day program. The national office picks a theme and everyone picks a topic that relates to that theme. The problem is that kids aged 10-16 are not particularly worldly or aware of so many neat topics. Consequently, judges see a lot of topics around Helen Keller, 1960's Civil Rights, and Navajo Code Talkers.

What if there was a web site that showed all topics and a kid could see a quick synopsis of the topic. And what if we plugged in a lot of "common" topics and build a tagging system around it. "Interested in Helen Keller? Have you thought about A, B or C?"

So, since I'm not a programmer, I was wondering if anyone's come across a simple tagging tool that would allow me to build something like that?

Thanks!

How do you index your Ray Mears clips?

verisimilitude — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:39:26 -0800

How can I add summary data to my video files? I've recently started a project to put all of Ray Mears's survival tips into some sort of idexable format. At this early stage I'm taking the hour long TV episodes and splitting them into 20 or so short avi. clips. To do this I'm using Windows Movie Maker to view the show and strip out all the content that isn't pure Ray wilderness gold. The output avi. I then put through a simple wmv/avi. splitter.

My question is in two parts. The first general, second specific.

1) Am I going about this project in the best way? This is the first video editing Ive done, so if there is better software for stripping the useful content out of TV shows then please let me know.

2) I'm going to finish up with about 1000 clips of educational wilderness survival, and I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm going to organise them ... but I'm sure that the tagging needs to be done now. For example, a clip with Ray demonstrating how to build a pit oven I would tag "cooking" "woodland" "meat preparation" - I'm sure you get the idea. But how do associate these tags with the file? I assumed I would just be able to open each of the avi file's properties and add the tags as summary data. Alas no. The summary data is 'greyed out' so my plan appears to be foiled.

My concern about this greyed out quirk led me (via a google search) straight to those infuriating bastards at 'experts exchange' where my question has been posed:

"I'd like to enter some descriptive comments for some of my files, to view in explorer (via My Computer), but when I rightclick/properties/summary/simple, everything is greyed out (well, greened out)."

So google as fails me, my faith in the Hive Mind grows.

Thanks for reading all this.

Help me find the image manager of my dreams?

verb — Sat, 03 May 2008 11:23:07 -0800

I'm sitting on an extensive collection of ephemera and period clip-art. I use it a lot for designs, presentations, and assorted projects, but as it's grown organizing the contents has turned into an impossible task... Is there a file/image management program out there that will let me keyword-tag the images, search them, browse thumbnails, and so on? My ideal solution would be a Spotlight-integrated tagging solution in Finder, and SpotMeta seemed perfect. Unfortunately, it's been abandoned and no longer works in Leopard.

Email tagging program

cbushko — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:24:49 -0800

My google-fu is failing me on this one. Years ago I found a program that would take all the email I recieved, add it to a database and then it would run some algorithm to associate all of the email information together; essentially tagging it all. I was then able to open up their web interface and search for any topic I wished from my past emails. Think of tagging bookmarks ala del.ic.ious but for email but it auto-tagged everything on it's own. Basically the flow of email would be Exchange server -> "this program" -> Outlook. I vaguely recall that the program was written in Java and was freely available.

Geoblogging - how do I keep friends updated while I walk 100km for charity?

uk_giffo — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:52:41 -0800

In the summer me and three friends will be doing a 100km 30-hour walk for charity alongside lots of other teams. I was hoping to come up with a way in which friends, family and donors can check on our progress in real time, from afar. Ideally, what I would like to do is create a web page, which would incorporate a Google Maps, er, map. Within this map would be the route we've walked so far illustrated with chronological numbered points. Clicking on a numbered point would bring up maybe a quick comment or a photo that I will have posted from my GPS-capable phone (it's a Nokia N95). Or maybe the numbered point will be a hyperlink to a blog post further down the page. But anyway, it's not really the layout I'm having trouble envisaging, it's really how I would go about this that I'm having problems with.

I am pretty techy so am comfortable with some web and server programming but I'm not really looking to do this as a way of learning a new language so the easier, more out-of-the-box solution the better!

So, I'm interested in seeing examples of how this thing has been done before, as it must surely have been. Extra points for examples with technical explanations of how it's been done (i.e. via such and such API, with Javascript, or using Ruby on Rails)!

Many thanks.

Suggestions for Photo Management Software Shared Over a Network?

macinchik — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:46:17 -0800

Suggestions for Photo Management Software Shared Over a Network? I'm in the exact same situation as the person who asked this question on the topic, more than a year ago.

To summarize: "I need to find networked photo management software, similar in function to Picasa or ACDSee, but with the ability to share "tags" between multiple users over a network. The products I've been able to find all allow tagging, but those tags are available only to that user, and my company needs to search the photo tags without each user having tagged each photo individually."

Is iView still the way to go? It seems likely but I must say I am hesitant to adopt it since it was recently acquired by Microsoft. There's something called Portfolio Server but it is out of our price range.

Do programs like Aperture, Bridge, Lightroom, etc., allow you to edit metadata "within" the photo files, so that if a group of people keeps their photos on a shared drive, those photos will indeed begin to collaboratively accumulate tags and other sorting information?

Searching using tags and search folders in Outlook web access

ajp — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:00:11 -0800

How best to use search folders with categories to search through Gmail-style tags, in Outlook? For various reasons, I'm attempting to implement some form of "tagging" using Outlook 2003.

There are plenty of guides on the web for people who've tried to do this. They all involve creating categories as the tags, and search folders to find them. This I have done, and so far, so good.

However.

Let's say I have a "projects" tag (category), and then multiple separate tags per project. So I may want a search folder to contain all emails for "Projects AND ProjectOne". Unfortunately, search folders do "Projects OR ProjectOne", thus returning any emails tagged with Projects, ProjectOne, ProjectTwo, ProjectThree etc. Not so good. I need a separate folder for each of ProjectOne, ProjectTwo, etc.

I could get around this by disposing of the "Project" tag, but I'd prefer to keep it.

There is a way around this in the desktop client, using views. Here's the recipe: select the search folder, then select from the menu: View | Arrange by | Custom... In the dialog, select "Filter", then select the "More choices" tab, then click the "Categories" tab. Select multiple categories, click OK, then select the SQL tab. Select the checkmark so you can edit it, then change any ORs to ANDs.

Hey presto! Fixed. The search folder for "Project AND ProjectOne" now contains only those emails, and none from the other projects.

However (again).

This doesn't appear to work in web access. The search folders are visible, no problem. But the view settings are gone. The folder reverts to ORing not ANDing the tags.

So the question is: can I get "tag1 AND tag2" (not "tag1 OR tag2") working in search folders, in web access as well as in the desktop client?

A few pre-emptive notes:

Yes, I really want to do this.
Yes, it has to work in web access too.
No, I can't install any fancy software like taglocity. It has to be a "native" Outlook solution. I'm running windows XP and I'm not interested in the Windows desktop search thingy.

Muchos gracias for any suggestions. If I work it out, I'll post the answer here.

No more sweet music.

Skyanth — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 04:44:53 -0800

Say I wanted to fill the genre tags of my whole mp3 library automatically. Say I trusted the last.fm community enough to use the three most used tags for a certain song/album listed there (for example: New Order's Ceremony would get "80s" "new wave" and "post-punk"). Say I wanted to do this automatically. Say I had a Mac. How would I go about this? I hate that none of the software I know adds genre tags automatically. And yeah, I know that people think differently about different genres, but I'm willing to overlook that and just go for the most common genre "opinion" for now. This seems like a nice solution - I know it would go wrong on occasions, but it seems quite accurate overall.

I know /some/ Ruby. I'm not really proficient at it, but I could learn. Or can you think of a better way?

How can I annotate and tag text within multiple documents, so that I can categorize and search through my annotations later?

lunchbox — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:41:30 -0800

How can I annotate and tag text within multiple documents, so that I can categorize and search through my annotations later? I would like to do an academic project that involves investigating how the meaning of a particular phrase has changed over time. Basically, there is a particular phrase that is used in legal settings (e.g. court), and I suspect that its meaning has changed over the years (i.e. people are throwing it around more loosely these days, and it has come to mean several different things).

I want to analyze the way this term has evolved, using several thousands of pages of court documents as my data set. Ideally, I (or a friend) would go through the documents and "tag" every occurrence of this term with a label that describes how the term was used. Later, I want to be able to filter through this list so that I can see all occurrences in one category, and then the next, and so on. So basically I want to have something along the lines of del.icio.us, except I'm tagging text snippets instead of URLs. Make sense?

Is there any existing solution for this that you guys can think of? I dug around and found WordSmith/Concordance, TextSTAT, and a few other similar concordance programs, but they don't have the flexibility with tagging and so on that I'm looking for. I know how to program, but want to make sure first that there's no existing solution to this.

Any further ideas? (Feel free to suggest if you might have a better general approach, too!)

Stupidly Simple Recipe Management

SansPoint — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:17:36 -0800

What's a good, idiot-proof way for my mom to scan and manage her old recipes on her iMac? My mom has a shiny new iMac and a shiny new multi-function printer. She also has scads upon scads of recipes on cards and in magazines and things that she wants to scan in.

I set her up with Yep!, but it's too complicated for her. What she would love is just the ability scan stuff and sort through it, and make it as STUPIDLY simple as possible.

Suggestions? Solutions?

Tag relevance voting on amazon.com

bz — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:39:06 -0800

I'm doing some research, a timeline, on the evolution of user-experience on the web. I know, via AskMeFi (thank you!) that it was late in 2005 when amazon.com began testing tagging in general but does anyone know, specifically, when amazon.com began allowing users to flag or vote on the relevance of individual tags?

photo tagging software?

Popcorn — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:45:33 -0800

What is a good program (preferably free) that I can use to embed tags in my photo collection? I'd like to tag my photos in an embedded fashion so that I can organize them without messing with the existing folder structure. (Although it would be nice to be able to alter the dir structure based on the tags if need be). I'd like to tag them in some widely used scheme that is portable, kinda like ID3 on mp3's.

The picasa interface seems ideal to me but it seems that you can only use one tag per photo and the tags are not embedded.

Is there any thing like this out there that meets the requirements?

like ask.mefi - only completely different

luriete — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:56:49 -0800

My friends and I are working - and when I say working, I should add that it is with only very vague direction as we are almost all self-taught - on a web project which we think would be very useful to many people. It is in some small respect tangentially similar to Metafilter, but would not compete with it. Are there any out-of-the-box products, commercial or free, that allow a similar question-and-answer (or comment-and-answer) functionality, where anyone can post and/or comment? Of the several people playing with this idea and working on the UI, we have a competent graphic designer, a very competent Movable Type developer and a couple of somewhat-experienced programmers. We also have lots of friends who are generous with advice. But so far, we've been unable to find something that does what we need our product to do: receive and post tagged/categorized comments from the general readership (with or without some kind of user-management system), display them, and then accept comments on them.

Any suggestions? We have been saving up to pay our developer and may be able to afford enough to hire someone to build something like this, but I wanted to ask here to see if anyone was aware of a product that already did this.

Auto tagging MP3s based on a textfile

stupidsexyFlanders — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:48:56 -0800

MP3 tagging: I have hundreds and hundreds of songs tagged with the title like this: Stairway_To_Heaven. In a Word file, fixing this is trivial, and I could save that to a txt file. Is there tagging software that will rename by pulling from a text file? Windows only, please.

Help me Tag and Index a Pile of Office Documents

Alterscape — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:01:32 -0800

Networked repository for Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, full-text indexed and tagged. Does it exist? I'm interning at a small consulting company to earn some cash for grad school. My boss has asked me to research ways to store, full-text-search and retrieve about a thousand MS Office (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) documents that're currently stored in a well-organized (but non-searchable) heirarchy on a Windows server's shared folder. The initial plan was to use a Lotus Notes database (see my last AskMe), but for a variety of reasons that isn't moving forward as fast as he'd like.

The documents each relate to a project the company has worked on. Ideally, I'd like to be able to index the projects such that I can find all documents attached to the "foo" project, or all documents attached to projects for client "bar," as well as full-text search for documents containing "baz." If that's not achievable, I'm looking for customizable metadata fields, but just a general "tags" field or even straight full-text indexing would work if that's all that's out there.

The boss has suggested Google Desktop Search and either copying the archive to each machine or indexing the shared folder on each machine, but I'm convinced there has to be a more elegant solution. Unfortunately, whatever the solution is needs to work in a Windows-only software ecosystem and be relatively inexpensive. I'd love to roll my own php/sql or ruby-based solution, but he wants rapid turnaround and I don't have the skills to do this fast enough, sadly.

Any ideas what's out there, MeFites?

Photos in a web 2.0 world?

mge — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 23:38:25 -0800

Looking for online photo hosting software that combines the good parts of flickr and facebook hosting, of course there is... I've just returned home after getting married, and I'd like to put the wedding photos online. There are lots. At first I thought I would just buy a membership to flickr but there's one feature I'd really like in addition to what flickr has. On facebook photo hosting you can click on a person's face and it will put a box around it. You can then tag that person's face with a name and when you roll over the tag the box will show back up. I'd like to be able to do this as well.

I'm looking for software that I can either run on my debian based server that will let me host photos, tag them but also allow me to tag people or some inexpensive (on par with flickr) hosting that allows this. I have no idea how to search for software that does this. Gallery looked like it doesn't do what I want, but I'm not exactly what search terms I should be using here.

Labeling photos on a Mac?

aberrant — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 15:31:06 -0800

What's the best way of tagging/labeling pictures on a Mac? I have 2000+ photos I'd like to tag and label before I forget where I was when I took each of them. I've been adding descriptions into the "spotlight comments" space (under "get info"), but I'm wondering whether this is the most correct place to put such descriptions. I think it's convenient since I can now create smart folders based on keywords, but I have this uneasy feeling it's Not The Right Way To Do It.

Is there a way to add metadata to pictures so that that data can be retrieved easily? I despise iPhoto (mainly because I can't understand it, and because it doesn't let me preview the pictures on my camera before I import them. WTF?)

Alternately, how do I go about extracting the spotlight comments for a given file?

Decrypting Italian Graffiti Symbols

Ogre Lawless — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 12:44:09 -0800

Italian graffiti: questions about two common symbols in modern spray art. There are two standouts I'm curious about.

The first is what could be described as a "rifle sight": a circle overlaid by an overlapping cross. This symbol most often stands alone and is pretty common. It's not the Anarchist's circle-A but I thought perhaps it was related. I've got no clue as to what this one's about.

The second I know is loosely translated as "basso" or "down with" and looks like two overlapping V's and always used in conjunction with whatever we're wishing down and sometimes shown inverted in what I understand is the reverse -- "up with". I've been able to figure out (obviously) the "what", here, but is anyone familiar with the etymology? Perhaps some clarification on its use? I -thought- I saw it used formally in a town where a nice cloth banner read "VV the class of 88" or so and that didn't quite jibe so maybe my guide for this information was only partially correct in her understanding.

Finding a physical folksonomy for flimsy files

ajp — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 05:38:02 -0800

Is there a way of tagging paper? Is there a way of applying "folksonomy" (yuck, awful word) to physical paper? In other words, is there some robust method of labeling papers within a sheaf of printed material (such as a book or set of college notes) in a way analogous to "tagging"?

Specifically, I have a large set of printed and hand-written notes from college classes. They are all categorised appropriately, e.g. "human anatomy", "human physiology", "human pathology" and so on. However this has the same drawback as "folders" with email systems: one file can only exist in one folder, unless the whole file is duplicated. I'd like to be able to tag files and individual pages. Specific tags might include "hip" and "muscle", thus allowing me to rapidly locate anything to do with the muscles of the hip.

I'd like to find a tried-and-trusted method, although if anyone's got an idea about how to implement a system, feel free to post here (maybe we'll take it to chat if it gets convoluted). But I would prefer pointers to well-defined systems.

One question: am I actually looking for an indexing system? I would prefer a quick, robust, visually-oriented system that requires little maintenance.

I'm using docs.google.com to create and edit documents, and to tag them. So far so good. But I'd like something that I can apply to a physical bundle of papers.

I've searched MF and the web, but it's a tricky one to track down. "Physical tagging" and "physical folksonomy" yields lots of RFID and geotagging stuff, not what I'm after. Standard apology applies to anyone shrewd enough to find previous threads.

Organizing My Music MP3's

slowtree — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 11:01:59 -0800

"Tagging" My Music.....oh my I just bought a PMP player(Lyra) that uses Music Match Jukebox. I just installed Music Match on my PC and imported my music into it (what a mess) I can use the "Super Tagging" if i shell out $20 to go pro. Is there an Auto Tagging Shareware program or any MP3 Tagging out their that will make my job a lot easier? I would like to organize By Artist and Album but a lot of the info is missing from a lot of MP3s. Help!

Tagging MP3s and the Rock genre

Witty — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 11:14:17 -0800

How much or how little and in what ways should one consider breaking up the "Rock" genre when tagging MP3s? Years ago, I thought I'd "keep it simple" by not getting too wild with a ton of sub-genres of "Rock". I basically started with "Classic Rock" (anything pre-1980, for the most part), "Metal" (which includes everything thing from Def Leppard and Ratt to Metallica, Vader and Entombed). Everything else rock gets dropped into "Rock". There are, of course, a handful of exceptions to these "rules".

I still would like to avoid getting too crazy with genres. But anynow, several years and a lot more music later, I'm finding "Rock" to be just too broad. So does anyone have any suggestions for how I can comfortably break this up a bit more?

Genre selection can be such a headache. I mean, where to put R.E.M., for instance? In my day, they were "Alternative" or was it "Progressive"? Now what are they... just R.E.M. right? And this whole "Indie" thing they got now... I just can't seem to peg it.

Anyway... I know I'm "allowed" to do whatever I want and tag them however. But I'd like for my catalogue to make sense and be as useful to more people (friends, family) than just myself.

Blogger to Wordpress for a Fee?

0bvious — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:26:51 -0800

Moving from Blogger to Wordpress: Can I pay someone to have it done? I know pretty much how to go about the move, but my time and inclination are low at the moment. If I could pay a small fee and have it done for me (with the results outlined below) I'd be a very happy man...

-----

I have an extensive blogger blog with a several hundred post history. I want to move it over to wordpress, on the same server, whilst maintaining the same URL structure for its entire history (so all past links still reach their destination - I guess this is a htaccess issue).

Each of my past posts was also tagged using Del.icio.us. As a bonus I'd love this history of tags to be pulled into the new Wordpress blog (i.e. update all the posts with their appropriate delicious tags) so future tagging could be done from within the new blog.

Layout and design can stay pretty much the same as it is now, although a bunch of plugins ready and waiting would be a nice final bonus.

Any services that will do this move? Any enterprising Wordpress know-it-alls fancy doing this for a small fee?

Cheers

Viva la web revolucion!

Smarson — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 07:23:44 -0800

What is this web revolution I see before me? Over the course of the past year I have had a lot of time to surf the web and have come to the conclusion that a new era of web based communication is unfolding before my very eyes. It started when I stumbled across Lifehacker.com, which showed me a whole new side of the internet that I had never conceived of. From that point I began to discover websites that re-oriented the way I've come view information creation, distribution, and storage (Ask Metafilter being one of those discoveries). Some examples of websites I lump into this category are:

*Del.icio.us
*Metafilter
*Ask Metafilter
*Lifehacker
*Wikipedia
*Firefox
*Google (and it's all it's applications including Gmail and Gcal)
*Flickr
*Blogger/Wordpress/etc.
*Bloglines

The list goes on and on and is constantly growing (thanks largely to Lifehacker discoveries). Obviously Google and Wikipedia were known to me prior to my new found web exploration, but only as straight forward tools. It's only in the last 8 months that I've come to understand the potential of their design (e.g. Google Map Mash-ups and wiki-technology as a whole).

Among the above listed websites and others I identify in my "web revolution," I see common themes. The use of tagging is widely present as well as the concept of the blog (In reality Lifehacker and Metafilter/Ask Metafilter are just widely popular blogs with no single author and Flickr is essentially a collection of thousands of photo blogs). I guess even deeper than that is the theme of individual empowerment through the web. Most of these sites were not generated by large corporations (although they may later have been aquired by them), but rather created by a single individual or small group of individuals in order to address an existing need they percieved.

So my questions. Does anyone else see the watershed that I speak of, or is this normal web progression and my "revolution" is simply a personal one? If this is an actual distinct movement within the internet, does it have a name or other identifying characteristics similar or different to the ones I listed above?

I think I can make it taste better.

youarenothere — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 07:03:29 -0800

I'm trying to clean up my del.icio.us links... After creating a number of tag bundles and deleting and renaming superflous tags, I still find myself wanting to straighten up my del.icio.us links a bit more. Specifically, I'd like to batch edit a number of links at a time; that is, I'd like to add/remove a tag from a number of links at once, but not necessarily all links marked with that tag. Is there a quick way to do this? I did find Delicer, but would prefer something that I didn't have to download. (In the spirit of being oh-so-meta, I have, of course, browsed del.icio.us links tagged "del.icio.us," as well as this page.)

Secondly, I've been using del.icio.us director for some time as it's been the only usable UI I've seen created for the service, but would like to hear from others on del.icio.us interfaces that they've found clean, compact, quick-loading, and feature-rich (e.g. ability to edit links from within the UI). Danke!

Tag completion mode for emacs or the like?

dmd — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 07:34:55 -0800

I have a huge list of unique identifiers. A person needs to enter, for each one of those identifiers, a list of tags, and I'd like to make it really easy for them to tab-complete those tags, based on the ones they've already entered. For example:

CAT mammal, animal, has-whiskers, has-fur, enjoys-petting

I want to make it really easy for them to enter those properties. When they start, no properties will have been defined yet. Each time they enter a new one, a new property gets defined.

So, after hitting return after typing 'enjoys-petting', their cursor will be after

DOG

I'd like them to be able to type 'm', and have some sort of way to see the "mammal" completion on the screen somewhere, and hitting tab or somesuch should accept the completion. If they typed 'h', they should see both 'has-whiskers' and 'has-fur'; hitting tab should complete it up to 'has-'; if they then type 'f', the completion list should dwindle to 'has-fur', and ... you get the idea.

Is there some editor that would make this trivial? This isn't (or doesn't have to be) web-based - it's all going to be done by one or two people. It'd probably be best, I think, if it were implemented as something like an emacs mode. Anyone have the emacs-fu do make this happen? Or any other bright ideas? I just know this is close to trivial.