This feature is now live. This page badly NeedsEditing, NeedsUpdating and NeedsIntertwingling. Most of the content here apparently should be moved to a separate discussion/history page. -- dmppanda 15:34, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Follksonomy Tagging is a new feature which is currently being develloped (Sept 2007). Users will be able to add "tags" to MusicBrainz entities like on last.fm or del.icio.us.

See the release notes at ServerReleaseNotes/20071014 for current status of this feature. See FolksonomyTaggingSyntax for information about allowed characters in tags.

If you're looking for tagging ideas, want to know what tags other editors use, or want to let others know what tags you find useful, take a look at the UserTagsStandards page.

Some Musings about Tagging

These are some thoughts about tagging, started by DonRedman. I put them here, because I do not have the time to keep up with a MailingList discussion. So read it ans enhance it, or let it rot :-)

IMHO there are a few things MB should do, if you want tagst to work:

First, make tags navigable. Display them nicely and unobstrusively on the entity pages (no separate page!), so that people can browse through MB by clicking on tags, artists, albums, etc. A small tag cloud on each artist page should do the trick. If a user is logged in, show her both her own tags and everybody's tags. I believe you can copy a lot from last.fm's layout here.

The most important thing is to make tags usable. Tagging only works if it creates an information ecology. MusicBrainz is only one half of the ecology. The other half is the user at home. So what would people use tags for at home and egoistically for themselves?

• Sorting music: To enable people sorting their music according to their own or everybody's tags, the PicardTagger (the old one or PicardQt) should be able to fetch my tags and rename/move files according to the tag. The difficulty is to determine which one of the tags to use. Maybe a user could select a primary tag for each entity. If the lists of tags you store are order sensitive that this could just be the first entry.
• Tagging music: I mean tagging as in ID3 tags. That will probably turn out to be a major chalenge. How can you store MB folksonomy tags in music files in a way that is usable?

• In this case usable means that the major music players (Winamp, iTunes, foobar, and yes ideally Microsoft Media Player. Don't know about Linux) should be able to read the tags. I have no idea about their special/proprietary tagging schemes, but they should all be supported. Probably by plugins to Picard.

• It turns out that there might be a very simple standard, that all players support and which could make folksonomy tags really useful: Playlists.

• Imagine a small app that crawls all my music files, reads the MBIDs, fetches either my tags or everybody's tags for these files and builds playlists from them. This way I could listen to all my 'chilly' music (using the player of my choice on any system). Most importantly this would create a dynamic information ecology in which users add tags to MB, download them with the appp, use them, correct them or add more, etc. This dynamics would give MB tons of RFEs, Bug reports and most importantly tags. I know that there are many pitfalls on the way to such an ecology. One of them might be bandwith. But hey, MB can make this a subscriber feature (sorry we cannot alow more than x requests per minute unless you pay for your bandwidth). I mean, last.fm makes me pay 30 Euros per year for a similar feature, and my tags are not free. 'My tags'on last.fm are theirs.

I think you get the idea. I am not set on the playist idea. But I seriously believe that folksonomy tagging will only lift off if you provide some kind of usable feature on the side of the user at home and enable a feedback loop from MB to the user and back. -- DonRedman 12:35, 23 September 2007 (UTC) (Please feel free to correct, expand, edit this text as boldly as you like, :-) rather than making it an unreadable dicussion.)

Using folksonomy tags for personal collections/wishlists

Something that just occurred to me while replying to a random request for help, is that we could use the folksonomy tagging support to implement the often-requested "I have this album" / "I want this album" feature.

There's no need to have voting and whatever on the contents of my personal collection and wishlist - while the current (still-in-beta) interface for the folksonomy tags isn't ideal for this, I think the back-end database support is. And we can use the forthcoming support right away, with some simple conventions.

If you have a release, tag it with "owned-<modname>" (e.g. I would use "owned-dupuy"); if you want it, use "wanted-<modname>" instead.

Once there's some search capability for tags, you should be able to search your collection and wishlist. You can (sort-of) do this already with the current (still-in-beta) interface by using the http://test.musicbrainz.org/show/tag/?tag=owned-dupuy URL interface (is there a way to add this to the search things on the left sidebar?).

If this seems to be popular, the next next server release could treat these "collection tags" specially:

• adding buttons ("I have this", "I want this") to release page that add the corresponding tag
• filtering these tags from the standard tags view and displaying them separately
• preventing moderator "luser" from adding "owned-otheruser" and mapping user-entered "owned" and "wanted" to "wanted-luser" automatically
• maybe using a namespace-reserved character (like ':') for collection tags, e.g. "owned:dupuy" to simplify this special treatment (we'd want to mass-convert the database if this is done)

@alex 23:00, 25 September 2007 (UTC)