What are machine tags?

Like other tags, machine tags help describe stuff, just more specifically. For instance, a person might tag Joe Monninger’s Two Ton, a book about underdog “Two Ton” Tony Galento’s historic fight with champion Joe Louis with terms like this: “Joe Louis, Tony Galento, Joe Monninger.” But tags alone can’t tell us which of those three named people is the author or subject. They’re all just tags.

But that’s what’s different about machine tags. Here’s how they’d tell us more:

• subject=Tony Galento
• subject=Joe Louis
• subject=boxing
• author=Joe Monninger
• isbn=1586421158
• isbn=9781586421151

How can I enter them?

When writing or editing a post or page, look for the new bSuite Machine Tags form below the post content. Enter the machine tags there, and they’ll be saved with the rest of the post.

How can I use them? Where can I see them?

All this does is make it easy to enter or edit these tags. It doesn’t do anything to display them. This is a feature only a geek could love right now, as you’d have to write code to actually use it.

Where did this idea come from?

I originally got the idea from Dan Cat, who eventually went to work for flickr and implemented them there. Dan’s original work is gone, but he’s got a good blog post about the flickr machine tag launch.

Hey, that’s not how they work in flickr

I know, it’s missing the namespace component. The underlying structure of WordPress doesn’t make it easy to use multiple namespaces, and because I’m lazy and the applications I have in mind just now don’t need it….

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