Tim Spalding, of LibraryThing fame, has come up with an intriguing twist on his book-tagging operation. He's capturing combinations of tags and turning the results into web pages. 'Tagmash' takes anyone who looks for a tag combination to a URL for that combination.
Since I'm reading Charles Handy's autobiographical "MYSELF and other more important matters", I threw in 'Handy, philosophy' to Tagmash. This is what came back:
In fact I lie, because the tags list their soundalikes, which are usually misspellings and punctuated words. 'handy' stood alone while 'philosophy' included 26 alternatives. Anyone searching for 'Handy, philosophy' in future will be taken straight to the URL. New combinations take up to 30 seconds to materialise.
You can apparently skip particular tags by preceding them with a '-'. I tried, 'Harry, Potter, -fiction' and got the same 16 results with or without the final argument. But, by using a double-minus, I got a single result. As Spalding explains, "A single minus (-fiction) 'discriminates' against items tagged 'fiction'. A double minus (--fiction) disqualifies all books with the
fiction tag." Perhaps mine was a foolish choice of tags anyway.
According to Spalding, "Tagmashes work with different things, not a thing and its category." I tried "http://www.librarything.com/tag/florence,michelangelo" and, there on top of the list, was one of my all-time favourite books.
Alongside the results are a cloud of related tags, related tagmashes and a list of related subjects.
Like all Web 2.0 stuff, LibraryThing and its offshoots like Tagmash are work in progress. As people get involved and use the system and talk about it, ideas for refinements pop up and get incorporated. And, of course, the more people that use it, the more intelligently the underlying system behaves and the more any dross gets sidelined.
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