A Thought on Bundles Before Bed

I just found out about the bundles feature on del.icio.us. Essentially it allows you to bundle a number of tags together and create something of a tagweb. Needless to say once I figured this out I started experimenting. First it was putting a few companies into the bundle "companies" and then a few other basic things. As I was bundling together multiple "continents" tags I decided to just include all the continents in the bundle, disregarding the fact that I had not used tags for half of them. Well, ladies and gentlemen, turns out this is a not a problem at all.

What's the big deal you're probably asking. Well, this means predictive tagging is now possible. This is huge. I'm not quite sure how it's huge, but I'm sure it is. Maybe when I wake up in the morning I'll have it figured out. But there's something magical about the ability to predict the tags you might use in the future by putting them in appropriate bundles (and of course, to avoid hierarchical problems, tags can appear in multiple bundles).

Here's an example: Let's say I put Japan under the bundle "countries" and "Asia," then, if I could tag the bundles I could put "Asia" into the bundle "continents" and just from tagging an article with "Japan" something/someone (is it the user? the computer?) could understand that Japan is a country in the continent of Asia.

Maybe it's late and I'm making no sense. Or maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and understand it all. Either way, I couldn't go to bed tonight without making some note of this.

If this was unreadable and insane, I apologize, occasionally you're going to have to deal with this kind of stuff . . . it's just part of the territory.

Now go to bed!