Blog of Wade Making Connexions

Tag Based Access Control

Tags are considered “an important feature of many Web 2.0 services”. Anything content related is bound to have tagging facilities embedded. Yet, when it comes to granting access to published content, we are stuck with archaic, pre-web controls ¹.

We are forced to squish people into access boxes. People nearly always have overlap, again, Reality is not clearly defined. An example in reality, I work with a friend, we sometimes hang out, and we chat about the internet. Where does he belong in? Work, Friend, Hangout/Dinner Party, Internet Discussions?

Why are we limit to just one of these options? A result of not having granular access controls, is we end up self-censoring. When we self-censor, part of us is condemned to death. We stop that part of us from living and being expressed, we shut it down, saying it doesn’t belong. The reverse is true, every part of our being belong, it’s the inability to handle dynamic personalities and relations that don’t belong.

The effectiveness of tagging for things is well established, why not extend it to people? The same requirement exists.

Right on! I’ve been saying this for years. There are scaling problems with it, but I really believe it’s the way to go.

OT: I posted this under my OpenID but it failed (tried to log me into WP?!)

Hi Mate,

I’d be interested in hearing more about these scaling problems, I don’t really understand, it’s just another tab, local to each user. Same as the local tag clouds each user keeps on flickr.

RE OT: Thanks for pointing that out, I just replicated it. Go Early-adopter plugins and wordpress updating breaking functionality! Will try fix now.

Test w/ Open ID

Hi Lachlan, It appears to be fixed. Thanks for alerting me to this problem. I have now moved over to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/installation/ which works better with Wordpress 2.5.

Peace,

Wade