Tags in PIMs

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 1, 2010 at 12:45 PM

It depends what you define as visual; as discussed here in the past, a hierarchical outline is itself a visual representation. In this sense, both Surfulater and Evernote which provide the ability to organise tags on an outline do provide a visual representation. Alternatively, one could use Personal Brain to define many-to-many relationships between tags and then link information items to them.

The way I see it, most of us will agree that it isn’t possible to organise information in strictly hierarchical themes because certain items will fall under several themes. Thereon, however, there are two approaches:

(1) Rely on free tags to label information items

(2) Maintain the hierarchy, but use clones to include information items under multiple folders

I personally use (1) with Evernote, which is my universal capture tool, and where material will tend to be very diverse, making it difficult to build a structure around it. With Surfulater, I use (2), because the material that ends up there falls into a much more limited and well organised set of themes, i.e. my professional and academic interests.

In some cases it makes sense to use both systems; for example, my downloaded files are organised by source in the file system, but linked to from several thematic groups.

One thing I would find hard to do is to _not_ have some kind of outline organisation in the tags themselves; this may just be the I’m old school though.

Glen Coulthard wrote:
>What seems to be missing from many such apps is a visual representation of the tags—a
>tag cloud is one obvious example, but I’ve seen other methods. Tags are great if they
>help users retrieve information or even cue one’s memory, but I’ve seen too many
>tag/keyword/label implementations that merely offer yet another hierarchical
>organizing outline (yahoo, for short