LibraryThing (an online service to help people catalogue their books easily) recently launched a very useful feature that they call “Tag Mirror“. This is one of the more interesting things that has been done with tags. In fact, I would wager that this is one of the best thing to happen to tagging since tag clouds came along.
Tag Mirror “holds a mirror” up to your books and to you. Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them.
Compare my tag cloud with my tag mirror and you’ll instantly see just how useful this is. My tag cloud shows my perspective of the books that I have while the tag mirror shows the world’s (the LibraryThing community) perspective of the same.
Take all the entities that you have tagged (in this case, books), pull in the tags that others have used for them and you have your tag mirror. Simple. Yet very powerful. This seems like such an obvious thing to do, that it is almost surprising that no one has ever done it! (Or am I plain ignorant?)
Additional notes:
- Check out Thingology — LibraryThing’s ideas blog, on the philosophy and methods of tags, libraries and suchnot.
- LibraryThing has done some other fun things with tags (and other data in general). Their “tag merge” feature allows their users to group different tags that are in fact not that different. The usefulness is obvious.
- LibraryThing is a rather cool site.