Dammit Jim!

Aziz of metaBLOG suggests that the new tags in WordPress 2.3 can be used to create a “folksonomy” on WordPress blogs. For those not in the know (including me until a couple days ago), a folksonomy is is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content according to Wikipedia. Basically it’s letting normal people (versus say artificial intelligence or an administrator) help describe things. For example, adding a tag on flickr or using del.icio.us.

So since WordPress doesn’t currently have anything like a public “Add a Tag” and I haven’t coded a WordPress plugin recently (although I did upgrade WP_MonsterID if anyone is using it), I thought I would code up a quick plugin to see how it works. So here is WP_Folksonomy. It’s fairly basic at the moment but I’d like to get it out there to see if it’s useful and if anyone is interested in it.

Since it uses WordPress’s tagging features WP it’s only going to be compatible with WordPress 2.3 and up.

I was skimming Simon Willison’s blog (I know his uncle) when I came across this cool idea for automatic avatar generation. Well to tell the truth, I took one look at the title “Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification” and deleted the link from my RSS reader but the next day a link based on that idea came up for generating a unique monster avatar for each user that did catch my interest. After all if it’s got monsters, it has got to be interesting.