What is Tagz ?
Tagz is a simple way to find and share new links on the internet. Inspired by delicious and reddit, we set out to build something with the goodness of both these wonderful sites put together, with some nice little extras thrown in.
Why Tagz?
delicious proves that collectively, people tend to pretty accurately tag items. OTOH, while social news sites like Digg, Reddit and the zillion other clones (and forks) tend to focus on comments and the community aspects, their taxonomy tends to be very rigid. So, I thought of marrying the two ideas. The idea is hardly original, I've read about it a quite a lot of times on various blogs and programming.reddit. But whenever I talked about this, the universal response from my friends and acquaintances has always been on the lines of "Social News is pretty much a solved problem, there's little or no room for any further improvement in that space". Tagz was born as an experiment to see how well would a chimera of these two concepts fare in the wild.
We wanted a fast, easy to use bookmarking site, with a little bit of smarts built in. We also wanted to add a little more of the social aspect to social bookmarking, so we added reddit style voting and threaded comments.
Now that we're done talking about the prime motive, here's another issue I (jeethu) had with tagging. Yes, I'm talking about the plurals problem. But its really more than just that. Consider variations like color colorful colored. This really is a solved problem. Search engines face the exact same issue (albeit on a much larger scale), and they use a technique called stemming to reduce every word to its root form.
Why social bookmarking sites haven't adopted this for tags is really beyond me. So, we implemented this in tagz. Whenever tagz finds that there are bookmarks tagged with the related stemmed forms of the tags currently used for filtering, it suggests it on this sidebar with a link to show all the bookmarks with those related tags (for instance try here and here). This works everywhere, in the global pool of bookmarks as well as a users's bookmark pool.
Somewhere down the line, we discovered that this isn't enough either. People tend to use different spellings for the same words. Americans spell IPA:/ˈkʌl.ə(ɹ)/ as color, while the Brits spell it as colour and the rest of the world, tends to spell it either ways. This is especially pronounced here, in India where we're taught British English in school, while we tend to gravitate towards American spellings (Well, at least me and the kids who grew up with me did).
We solve this with a simple dictionary based approach, and the results seem pretty good.
Tagz was built with:
- Python
- Django
- Xapian
- Postgresql
- Memcached
- YUI
- Markdown ( specifically, python-markdown )
- Pygments (for syntax highlighting)
- famfamfam icons
Who made this?
Two geek brothers from India, Jeethu Rao and Thilak Raj Rao. Jeethu does the coding while Thilak does nothing ;) handles the other things.
And yeah, lets not forget the woman who set this all off. Yes, I'm talking about you, Pria.
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