Tags for searching and tags for browsing

I gave a tech talk about Reef last night at Boston Perlmongers, a local group of perl aficionados based at MIT. (Reef is the software that 2People will be based on.) It's the first time I've gotten that kind of input and scrutiny from a big tech crowd, and it was great. Very lively conversation and lots of thoughtful comments. I was very gratified that my basic architectural decisions went over quite well, and I think people were pretty intrigued by the project.

One of the best moments of the night was a colloquy on tags. Someone suggested that Reef could "help" the community converge on a common tag set, by making suggestions based on what tags have already been used (what del.icio.us does, only it gets more interesting when you try to do it for things that haven't yet been tagged). Someone else suggested that if you're building a taxonomy -- which we are -- then you converge on a tag set by the simple act of putting your content into the hierarchy itself. In other words, you either add a brand new node in the set of categories, or you choose an existing tag.

These two views on tagging are both valid and important to understand. One represents a "search" purpose, the other a "browse" purpose. We hope that Reef can support both of them. When Google/gmail says "Search don't sort," they're really mixing apples and oranges. Sorting isn't an end in itself (like searching), we do it because we want to be able (later) to browse. Searching and browsing are two fundamentally different and important modes of information seeking. Reef will integrate them both.