Non-sequitur: a fish

I awoke today from a crystalline dream about a fish I had as a child.

It seems as though to achieve official blogdom, a blog must have the occasional random entry. This entry will serve that purpose. While this blog is an attempt at chronicling my professional meditations on UI/UX I do state that it also observes my pursuit of life and liberty.

Since I was laid off almost two months ago (where has the time gone?) my sleep pattern has changed radically. Mostly by that I mean I now sleep occasionally--almost regularly. In fact last night I overslept. Around the time the alarm went off I was in the spell of a most compelling dream. I turned off the alarm in a state of semiconsciousness and managed not to fall out of the dream.

The dream was about a goldfish from many years ago. Somehow I had discovered it still alive while going through some odds and ends that I still have at my mother's house. It was clearly ecstatic to see me and when I put my hand in the pristine water of the fish bowl it pressed against my hand affectionately like a loyal dog. I felt that the water needed to be changed and as I followed my old water changing methods the goldfish kept trying to escape. I managed to keep it in the bowl but as I set it down to resume cleaning this very persistent fish started climbing over the edge of the bowl in a most unfishlike manner.

I lowered the water level and set the bowl on a towel as it had gotten wet on the outside. After doing so I again turned to resume cleaning duties. With this the fish started jumping out of the water like a dolphin at an aquarium. Flipping in the air...attempting to keep my attention.

I brought the fishbowl downstairs to show to my mother and brother for whom the fish continued to perform its antics. They were spellbound by its very athletic prowess. My fish was most definitely a special fish.

When I finally woke hours later the dream was still fresh in my mind's eye. My love for the fish was strong and I was struck with how much I missed it. I remembered vividly understanding that the fish wanted me to dip my hand in the water--it wanted to snuggle against me. I had a connection with it such that I knew that behind my back it was trying to get out of the bowl to follow me. I intuited that it wanted me to be impressed with the tricks it had learned. And the whole time, I was in awe because this fish was decades old and had managed to find sustenance and keep its own bowl clean in my absence.

I don't know what the dream means, but I woke up happy and refreshed from what was an amazing dream and a very restful night of sleep. What an amazing dream!

P.S. Happy Birthday, Dad!! 68, woo!

Everything is a tag

We were developing tag functionality in our products and our product team came up with a mantra about it. Our company products included message boards (also called discussion boards, forums, and referred to as chat in the UK), blogs, idea sharing tools, and file libraries.

The mantra recommended that tag functionality be applied at the discussion level. For blogs, this meant on the blog post, for message boards this meant entire threads. I believe this mantra stemmed from how tagging made sense in the idea tool and the file tool, or perhaps because of how it needed to apply to blogs.

This got under my skin a bit. Threads on message boards can get tremendously long. What if a tag, let's say "fish" was applied to a discussion, how could a user figure out why that tag had been applied? It seemed logical then to say that our mantra was wrong--for message boards at least, the tag should be applied at the message level.

As I mulled this over, I started having more thoughts on the topic, and I started seeing tags differently. Tags are bookmarks if you will. Means by which users can apply a keyword to an object on the Internet, be it a Youtube video, a blog post, or a message on a message board.

One day I performed a google search for something and the result that intrigued me linked to Wikipedia. None of this was unusual, I probably search on Google 20+ times a day at least, and of the results, Wikipedia comes up in the top ten almost every time. That I clicked on a link to Wikipedia wasn't really shocking either, I regularly, let's say 5-10 times a week, follow links to Wikipedia and get my information there.

I love Wikipedia and what it stands for. What a notion--to pull data from a centralized and multilingual meme repository. Sheer genius!

It comes as no surprise to me that my view on tagging changed on Wikipedia. In fact, it seems appropriate at this time for me to link to the Wikipedia page on tags. It was in Wikipedia, and only heaven knows what I was looking up at the time, that I realized that within a message itself, there needed to be tagging. Because of prolific posters who manage to type really long messages such as myself, it might become difficult for a user, following tags for "fish" to figure out why that tag had been applied at the message level. Tags need to be applied at the content level (within the message).

When I typed "Everything is a tag" as a subject, I might have wanted to tag the word "tag" for example. The data itself, all-inclusive is where tags belong. This is a critical failure in most social media tools I see today, with the possible exception of Wikipedia. While they don't permit tagging persay, they allow hyperlinks within the posts. While most social media tools do this as well, this is only tagging in the context of wikis and only when the links point to additional wiki pages. Perhaps I am wrong in thinking that this should serve as a means of tagging, but it is where the idea struck me.

So what do you think? Do you like tags? Do you think that metadata is overkill? Do you believe tags belong at the content level? Sound off!