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The Future Of Tags

An arc is a tag on a link, or a series of links, rather than an address. Arcs express a relationship rather than a property. They can be ordered (a series or graph) or unordered (a set or bag). Arconomies should be the next big thing® for the net.

Tags can be used to create tuples, e.g.:

  • arcs, relationships between tags.
  • bags, collections of objects under a very specific tag.
  • series, possibly open ended series, identified by numeric or seminumeric tags.

Specific tags for tuples can take the form of Java names (org.robmyers.digital-art). Seminumeric tags can take a similar form (org.robmyers.digital-art.27) or be part of a general parameterized tag system (org.robmyers.digital-art(27, blue, ‘a dog’) ).

A tag tuple space would make the entire net the subject of a system like Linda tuple spaces or JavaSpaces.

As well as specific and parametric tags, hierarchical tags (blue tagged with colour tagged with property tagged with concept) can be used. Or the author of a tag can provide personal information to help understand how they might be using that tag (which could be dangerous for privacy as marketeers mine this information), tagging their tags with contextual information.

Since tagging tags can be useful, possibly arcs and tuples on tags can be useful as well.

As tags grow in popularity, tag spam and tag boosting will become common, as will spam-encoded and 1337 tags. Hopefully Bayesian filtering will work well on tag/URL/author combinations to protect against this.