{"id":253,"date":"2005-03-25T18:24:52","date_gmt":"2005-03-25T22:24:52","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2006-05-21T20:51:09","modified_gmt":"2006-05-22T00:51:09","slug":"too_many_information_is_as_useless_as_no","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/03\/25\/too_many_information_is_as_useless_as_no\/","title":{"rendered":"Too many information is as useless as not enough"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have been notified by Lifehacker <\/a>that a new Del.icio.us interface was being tested. I followed the instructions to see it and put http:\/\/del.icio.us\/new\/fredonsomething in my browser and pressed Enter.<\/p>\n

When I see the thing for the first time, I stopped breathing. My brain was not able to compute what I was seeing. I was like a protagonist in a story of H.P Lovecraft. What was that?<\/p>\n

I started, slowly, to understand what was going on with Del.icio.us. Thousands of words were spread in my screen like an endless vortex made of words and colors.<\/p>\n

I wondered where my tags were. I had closely checked my screen, trying to decipher something to this gibberish. I finally find out that my tags was there; with some different colors dependant of the number of links tagged with them. I figured out that it was my old one colon tag list squeezed in a table.<\/p>\n

I started to use Del.icio.us some months ago. Lately I only added bookmarks to my account, without looking at my home page. I never, ever thought that I generated as many tags with 112 entries.<\/p>\n

After I realized it, I started to like the new interface, it’s an improvement on the old one, no doubts. But it raises a question about tags.<\/p>\n

It’s sure that a simple word can’t catch the meaning of a resource by itself. It’s why you need many tags to describe the meaning of a resource. In this case, it’s normal to have more tags than resources (links in our case).<\/p>\n

But, is the interface that manipulate these tags is really what a user need? Do I need to see all tags that describe resources? Could we introduce a concept of meta-tags to help the user to handle this mass of (not always useful) information?<\/p>\n

Tags can be useful but too many tags are like not enough: it’s useless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been notified by Lifehacker that a new Del.icio.us interface was being tested. I followed the instructions to see it and put http:\/\/del.icio.us\/new\/fredonsomething in my browser and pressed Enter. When I see the thing for the first time, I stopped breathing. My brain was not able to compute what I was seeing. I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","category-web"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}