Monday, March 27, 2006

Adam Tackles Big Picture Issues
There are a few big-picture issues I've been thinking about lately regarding the network. To aid my thinking, I'm going to make a series of very long blog posts and ask for your feedback.

Here's the first such blog post. The topic is using TAGS versus CATEGORIES/HUBS. The next topic will be on how to handle fandom auto-submission.

Note: We could do tags on blog posts as well.

Enjoy!


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On Tags and Categories

One of the hallmarks of web 2.0 is the proliferation of “tags.” Tags are, simply enough, linked keywords on a person’s works or profile. For example, someone might upload a photograph and “tag” it with the following keywords:

Mountain, ocean, scenic, photosmart camera

Viewers of this work can then click on any of the keywords and be transported to a list of all photographs on the site that are also tagged with these keywords.

It’s pretty easy to see how we could use tags on our site. You could upload a Naruto fan art, for example, and tag it with:

Sasuke, Naruto, Fight, Yaoi

Then when someone views your fan art, they can click any tag and see all fan art on our site that’s also tagged with “Sasuke” or “Fight” or “Naruto” or “Yaoi.” Even better, we can then link all wallpapers, ecards, cosplay, etc. tagged with any of these words to the fan art piece.

Imagine being able to go to:

http://www.theotaku.com/tags/Sasuke

and seeing all our content that’s been tagged “sasuke” – pretty cool, eh?

Currently, we do let you search by keyword, which leads to roughly the same result. The advantage of tags though is that (1) It’s faster than search, (2) It takes the work out of thinking of what to search for, and (3) It can be universal across our site.

Tags can also allow grouping, so you could see what keywords are most popular.

Some sites even JUST use tags with no categories. And the thought did cross my mind for replacing our hub system with a purely tag-based system. After a lot of thought though, I’ve decided against this for two reasons:

(1) User Experience: With a tag-based system, we couldn’t offer an elegant browsing feature. No drop-down menu with all our categories, for example.

(2) Spelling Differences: People will inevitably tag the same anime or character with different spellings.

One person could tag a dragonball fan work with “dragonball,” another could type “dragon ball,” and a third still could type “dbz.” Thus, a user who wants to see all dragonball fan works would have a LOT of browsing to do to see everything.

Categories solve this problem because everyone submits works to a DragonBall category. Some people do mis-categorize, but by and large it’s a minority of works.

Categories though have some weaknesses of their own, as we’ve seen.

(1) “Miscellaneous” gets SWAMPED. Since there are a zillion smaller anime going into one category, the miscellaneous hub gets swamped with so many diverse works it becomes practically useless.

(2) Adding a new category going forward. If we want to add a new category, it’s really, really tedious to migrate works from the miscellaneous category to the new category.

It seems to me that the BEST way to approach categorization is through a two-way attack:

(1) Allow people to tag their works AND require them to submit to the necessary category.

(2) If their category isn’t listed, have yet another text field that says “Anime (if not listed)”

The second option could easily replace our “suggest a category” link. And it would be better since it would rely more on actual use than on people’s requests. The section would also make migrating fan works into new categories much easier.

Now, by default, older fan works won’t be tagged. And that sucks. We COULD run some insanely intensive queries to convert the description/titles/keywords across our site into tags, and while I have an idea in my head on how to do that, I’m terrified at the prospect. If something’s wrong in the code or query it could have dangerous consequences. Plus it would take forever to run. So that’s a consideration.

I know how to go about implementing tagging on the site. I know how to design the database tables and the queries. So that’s not a problem.

My final thoughts: Let’s do it!!!
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