Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]

09/12/07 Colour Spectrum of Tags

DUBLIN, IRELAND - So this book passed on another interesting point about tagging. Something that hit home with me - and I couldn’t explain it to someone else, so thought I’d try here.

Humans can see 7.5 million (or more) colours, if I asked you to point out ‘red’ where would you point? Say red makes up a category of shades - where does red start and red end? Which is the reddest colour? Is your red the same as everyone else’s red? Do your environment, culture, education, geography determine that red for you?

I’ve always thought of tags an an interim solution. Tags show a weakness in our system, a weakness that we have to write or upload the explicit but still tag the implicit ourselves. Why doesn’t my blog recognise my language and know implicitly what I’m talking about? This is what tags are for - and this is where they fail. My red is different to your red.

It turns out that from the 7.5 million humanly distinguishable shades of colour (yes our monitors show 16.4 million, bit pointless), 150+ countries break them down into 11 similar categories in their own language (variants of red, blue, yellow etc.) yet they are all slightly different selections with the same name - but with enough points marked we can interpret what shade they were talking about in our own world of colours. Some languages have different primary colours, and some don’t have our colours at all, e.g. “Brown” doesn’t exist - it’s just an in between shade.

So for tags to be successful (yet still a pain we shouldn’t have) we must pinpoint a few places on that colour spectrum to give meaning and direction. With each place sitting under a different node of implicit description. i.e. you say “beach” I can go up the tree and say a beach is a type of “location”, the location leaf sits under a number of parent nodes under the “scenic”, “holiday”, “dangerous” and “polluted” branches. So which one? Add a second tag - “lilo”, ching - now we’re under the “dangerous” and “holiday” branches. Add “fun”, and we’re down to “beach is being used for a holiday”. Keep adding markers on the spectrum and we should be able to determine the implicit.

This post has done a complete circle in my head - and probably again doesn’t cover off what I was hoping to explain - but may make some of you think. I love being made think.

Also, isn’t the colour concept fascinating?

Tags: colours, explicit, General, implicit, spectrum, tagging, tags

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