http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiWordAsTag

I’ve been surprised at how much impact the social nature of allowing tags to travel can have on your personal productivity with respect to organizing mail for re-findability.

Within the small group I work with, I find I rarely have to tag incoming mail anymore even when it’s not a reply to a mail I sent, because I’ve adjusted my tagging behaviour to be consistent with my colleagues (and presumably vice-versa) This includes adding tags that they have used that I previously didn’t use and standardizing on consistent naming for concepts e.g. is it ‘bugs’ or ‘bug’; is it ‘Marketing’ or ‘market’. I’ve found these kinds of things quickly work themselves out – maybe it’s easier to sort these kinds of things out in a small group than a big group and is why tagging email is intrinsically different to tagging general web resources. Generally I find I’m only applying tags when I send mail and only if it’s a new mail (not a reply/forward etc).

With respect to the comments about private vs. public tag spaces, I’ve found that generally it’s natural for me to develop non-intersecting public/private tag spaces and I can’t think of an occasion where I’ve wanted to tag something with a ‘public’ tag, but not have it travel or vice-versa. My private tags tend to be the ‘Task Organizing’ ‘Get Things Done’ type of tags e.g. ReadIt, DoIt. I’m setting those tags to private not because they are sensitive but because I don’t want to pollute other people’s ability to Task Organize. For most of my tags I want them to travel, because I want them back again if people reply.

There are other social aspects of tagging that could potentially help to significantly reduce the volume of email that we have to process and manage. These are the kinds of things we’ll be focusing on as we introduce more of a group emphasis with the Taglocity 2.0 release.

Cheers
Martin

Hey Jon, thanks for taking a look.

We’ve got some social email tagging customers stories, and I’ve posted to our customer forum to let people know about this post so they can chime in here if they want too.

What we tend to see if small groups of people (5 – 20) form ‘group vocabularies’ with usually pretty detailed ‘domain specific’ tags. These range from project/client info, to all sorts of markers that would only make sense to that particular group. A typical number of tags for a group that size is around 80-100.

As you explained, the tags travel around on the conversation thread, and Taglocity has this ‘Unknown Tag’ button that you may have seen – we’ve found that customers are using this to ‘viral’ their tag sets, i.e. you send me an email with ‘SocialTagging’ on it, I see it but don’t have it in my set and can add it, etc. People spread their tags in very organic ways over time. It’s not perfect but it’s ‘low cost/low stress’ to do.

Importantly it’s sort of a ‘selfish self-action’ too, i.e. you tag your outbound email to help you when the replies come in, but the network effort benefits all those that use the tags.

The positive benefit to this social tag spread seems to be twofold –

(1) you get your email/meeting replies ‘pre-tagged’ for you, as in other have now put on the tags you originally spread and you can then have all sorts of rules/actions on what happens to it when it comes in and

(2) it makes the search/filter experience very different, in that you can filter down based on a tags domain vocabulary rather than rely on plain ol keywords. When you’ve got 10,000 emails over the years then things like this radically change how you file/keep things.

Anyway, enough of my thoughts as I have more bias than tags in all this. For our next release (2.0) we’re moving into this group/social email tags area with more emphasis on this group area, so perhaps outside this comment box I can talk about that next.

Thanks again,
David.

But if I could tag the items in my bank statement, that would be really useful …

Tags: tag “long tag” domain:name=value

http://www.flickr.com/help/photos/#140

We thought this is a very simple way to include tags in textual entries, and so we implemented the same way of reading tags from various data sources like email and SMS into Midgard CMS.

We you go beyond regular plaintext email you can of course use the rel tag Microformat:

http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag