Should lists replace tags?

What is the difference between a list and a tag?

(del.icio.us) tags are restricted to not having spaces, of course. Part of the reason for this is to make it easier to enter tags (don’t have to type commas on the tagline if you want to enter more than one tag for an item).

We might say that lists, on the other hand, can have a name with multiple words. For some systems, this might slow down the tagging process.

We might also say that a list is more than just text,– it can have data associated with it. For instance, a list representing an organization might have that organization’s home page.

John Tropea, in discussing lists on the web, points out how tags don’t allow this:

I suppose you could even use social bookmarks like del.icio.us, the problem here is that the tag label is the heading, leaving you nothing to describe the list with.

Basically, with a tag, there is no thing to describe or to tag. With a list there is.

With peoplicious, you don’t tag people, you put them in lists. Lists can have data associated with them. I don’t allow the lists themselves to be tagged, as John suggests.

With peoplicious, you people tag articles– you bookmark the article and say that it is about or by a person in the system. Those articles then appear under the person and whatever lists the person is in.

After reading John’s post, I was reminded of an earlier idea I had which was to also allow articles to be bookmarked directly under a list, and not one person. For instance, in the political peoplicious, http://opencampaigns.com, there is a list for SF Supervisor District 6 candidates. For an article talking about all the candidates, one has to categorize it under each individual in that list. It would be nice to just say its about the whole list.

In some sense, this would allow tagging (listing) an article by topic, where currently you can only people tag. Hmmm….