Towards a better world...
Why people ignore tagging?
I mean, it's the bloody future of the web, and they just ignore it: either don't tag stuff or they tag it with the slow, non-functional part of their brains.
When I found out about upcoming.org using hCalendars, I thought: oh goodie, gold mine: semantically marked events, free test data for my bsc!!!
BUT (the omnipresent 'but'), when I really started scraping it, I found out that figuring out semantics it's haaaard and misinterpreting standards (or recommendations, not to be so harsh) might be a hobby for some: gorgious abbr-locations, with void titles: I mean title="". Then why the f did you put that location class there in the first place?
And, to get back to the tags (which is the reason of this post)... take a look at the Sun mashup event today... Interesting, is it? BUT how am I suppose to discover it if it isn't tagged at all??? And this is not some mistake of an author, it's a habit (lots of events don't have tags at all).
I wonder, is it because upcoming DOES NOT have a field for tags in the 'add event' form? Hmmm... or because the 'add tag' button is pretty hidden on the event page? (it took me a while to find it. I admit, when I analyzed the tags of the events I was looking at the markup).
So which people are we talking about ignoring tagging? We might be talking as well about the developers: it's them who should realize the importance of tags and make it easier for users to produce tagged content. But since upcoming is 'a Yahoo company', I'm not surprised: it's not their first and personally, I'm expecting more...
If some developers don't realize the importance of semantic markup, maybe users do, and maybe it's us who should start the 'web revolution': your favourite events site does not provide tagging? Report it to the developers, send an email, make a request, state your wish for a better world! The website you upload your pictures to does not tag them? Change it! there are a lot of sites that do! Flood the upcoming mailbox with your requests to a decent tagging process so that next time you would be able to find out about the Sun mashup event...
