Where were you all this time when I needed you?

Quite some time ago a colleague of mine asked me:"Are there any tools to easily label documents with multiple values, like some sort of drag and drop kind of thing, me not having to think of directories and structures?" Typically making gestures like he was actually moulding it with his hands, like he uses to do when he talks about tools. When I answered there weren't any yet, he looked quite disappointed. So, here we are December 2006 with Tag2Find offering me a Beta test version. I installed it like a child opening a Christmas present, full of desire. After having tried it for some days my general conclusion is: These guys are on the right track, but they must push the idea to the full envelope of its potential. Meaning:

adding tags works quite well, the usability could be improved, but can wait a bit, the first big thing to improve is the usability of searching and navigating after having added the tags.

I'm envisaging some sort of semi-transparent desktop feature showing the tag cloud, maybe in a sidebar or as a web part on a portal. Not having to start Explorer to get to files, but directly starting from the desktop. The next step could be dragging and dropping files on the clouds on the desktop to tag files.

Think with the end-user in mind, the type of user with the desktop loaded with files seemingly without structure, these are the masses you should be aiming at, I'd say.

For more advanced users it would add value if the tags were visible in Explorer, mash up Explorer with Tag2Find. The development of the tool will definitely stay on my radar. Cheers Marc Stein and colleagues from Linz (Austria)!

Quaero: full stop

Quaero, the french/german R&D collaboration came to an end even before results were visible for public. Both countries' spokesmen stated that goals conflicted and further collaboration was not useful any more. Next to conflicts between goals, there were also technological difficulties. The idea was to build a web search engine for multimedia. Probably the idea will come to an implementation as many other research projects are taking place, e.g. Multimatch as well as commercial projects. The German partners of Quaero will commence by a project called Theseus. The French will also proceed so they say. A Thomson (France) spokeswoman said:

"The two projects were never one."

Jim Egan wrote on diplomatic traffic:

Quaero is an outgrowth of the “1791 Drill Regulations” mentality Napoleon tried to eradicate. Amazingly, this multimedia vacuum cleaner still cannot organize and index what little it lifts from the cultural carpet. In contrast, Blinkx (“the world’s largest video search engine”) trumpets that it now has over 6 million hours of searchable TV and viral video content. Competitors such as the long-toothed T. rexes MSN, Yahoo and Google, plus aspiring adolescents Ask.com and Accoona, are no doubt thankful the distracted French government expensively sired such a transparent, predictable and beatable foe. Designed to fight the last war, Quaero will not become a step-change and thus ensures U.S. internet search hegemony for years to come. Unless, that is, France’s elected leader finds inspiration and creatively disrupts the nature and cadence of competitive EU digital initiatives. To begin with, President Chirac should correct an out-of-step viewpoint revealed at an Elysée Palace speech last January. There he stated “Tomorrow, that which is not available online runs the risk of being invisible to the world.” Unfortunately, this is already the case for what exists online. Despite years of effort, search engines reach only 2% of the internet’s vast, growing and largely unexplored data jungle.

Peter Sayer published on Techworld:

Jean-Louis Beffa, chairman of the executive board of the French Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII), said the consortium ran into a problem with technology, and must now reshape the project. The French company leading the Quaero project, Thomson, wanted to concentrate on managing multimedia resources, while the leading German partner, Empolis, is focused on knowledge management, said Robert Havas, director of AII.

Furthermore Havas said:

Although France and Germany failed to agree on a focus for their work on search technologies, "co-operation between France and Germany is working well" in other research areas.

Thanks for sharing that thought with us Robert, that's really comforting.

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XKCD

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