iMechanica - What is a tag? - Comments

Joshua Schachter named the Innovator of the Year

Zhigang Suo — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:43:51 -0400

Each year, Technology Review names one person under 35 as the Innovator of the Year. This year's winner is Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service that has popularized tagging.

In addition to tagging, del.icio.us, is great collaboration tool. My group members have been experimenting to use it to recommend papers to one another.

As iMech grows, web services like del.icio.uso.us will be important to mechanicians. Give it a try.

Incidentally, if you'd like to recommend papers to me, but would like to do minimum work, my del.icio.uso.us username is zhigangsuo. While you are tagging a paper, one more click will let you recommend the paper to me.

All tags are optional

Zhigang Suo — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 14:25:13 -0400

At this point, we've made all tags in iMech optional. No need to agonize over which tag to use. If you do agonize which one of, say, two tags is more suitable for a post, it perhaps means that the post does not neatly belong to either. So why bother to agonize. Pick one, both or neither.

What is important is to make a good post online. Once online, the search engine will find it. If the post is good, other people will hyperlink to it.

What is a tag?

Teng Li — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 00:50:21 -0400

A tag is a keyword or a phrase associated with a post as a means of classification. In each post, the tags appear as a list between the title and the text of the post. If you click any tag in such a list, all posts in iMechanica with the same tag will show up. In effect, tags classify posts in iMech into channels.

When you write a post, you have the option to assign the post with one of the featured tags, which are listed in the header: research, education, mechanicians, opinions, industries, conferences, jobs, and tips.

You can also assign free tags of your own choice. For example, you may choose thin film, plasticity, fracture, JMPS, Budiansky, or anything you like, or nothing at all. Separate tags with commas. If you type a few initial letters of a tag, and wait for a second, a list of tags used by other people will show up. You may choose one of the tags.