I want to use tags in my computer for my email, my files, my calendar items, my contacts…

Posted by Troy Angrignon

October 3, 2005

I have always thought it was odd that I had to have different category lists everywhere in my computer and then had to keep them aligned. Will somebody please implement global tags that I can see on my computer so that I can look at all of the calendar items, contacts, tasks, emails, and files that have those tags?

Funny how new paradigms (like web 2.0) bleed into the old spaces.

Computing & IT, Main Page, Web 2.0

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Comment by Anonymous on October 3, 2005 @ 5:03 pm

I believe extensible metadata for regular files is a key point of several projects happening right now… WinFS on the win32 side (scheduled to arrive shortly before the second coming of Christ), and ReiserFS4 on the Linux/OSS side. I suppose the answer to your request is “hang on, they’re working on it…”

Software like Apple’s Spotlight and GNOME’s Beagle try to hack this functionality through indexing. I’m no programming genius but I find it odd that a standardized mechanism for user-extensible metadata is just now becoming a reality, especially when so many data formats have their own little ways of doing it (MP3, JPEG, etc).

I’m curious about cross-platform compatibility in this new age of metadata. What happens when John Doe can’t send his heavily-tagged documentation work to Company XYZ because their engineers still rely upon software that requires Windows 2000, or, God forbid, NT4? I’m wary of the wedge this would drive between platforms, because as cool as it will be to have a pretty little query window [mostly] replacing my gong-show of folder hierarchies, it’ll be a whole lot less useful when I need to shift my mindset (and workflow) in order to share files (and their meaning) with another individual.

I want to use tags in my computer for my email, my files, my calendar items, my contacts…

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