PowerShell Folksonomy – Are You In?

PowerShell Team

A while ago I did some experimentation with a PowerShell folksonomy.  The idea was to tag internet content (blogs, comments, newsgroup replies, etc) with unique tags that search engines would pick up and make it easier to find exactly the information you needed. 

This effort stemmed from an documentation battle we had over the use of the term cmdlet.  This was a word that I made up to describe PowerShell commands but I wanted to invoke the idea that these were tiny things that were composed with other tiny things to solve big problems.  One of reasons I was hardcore on this idea of a cmdlet being “tiny” is that I knew that development teams would baulk at the “tax” of having to write “commands”.   I wanted to be able to start the entire discussion with the premise that we were asking them for a very tiny amount of work.

Let me correct the record on this one.  Jim Truher just reminded me that I was pushing the term Functional Units (FUs) [can you detect my wiseass streak?] and that it was he that came up with the term “cmdlet”.  FUs remind me of a funny Dave Cutler story I once heard.  No wait – I can’t tell THAT story on a blog – never mind.

The documentation perspective was that we shouldn’t invent new words when there where perfectly good alternatives (“command”).  We had a  number of back and forth’s on the subject but what was a decisive datapoint was what happened when you typed the terms into search engines. 

By using the term “cmdlet”, we improved the signal-to-noise ratio of the search engines and provided our customers a dramatically better experience.

I got to thinking about that and wondered if we couldn’t do even better by adopting a unique tag PSMDTAG  (PowerShell MetaData TAG) and convention for using it so that people could use that tag to better find exactly what they were looking for. 

For a while I was peppering all my content with this tag and experimenting with various extension tags and then would see how the search engines did with it.  At some point I got distracted and stopped doing it but someone recently mentioned it again so I started to do some experimentations and I think it is an idea with picking up again. That said, to be successful, it requires the entire community to participate so I’d like to see if this is something you all would be interested in participating in.

Let’s start out simple – go to your favorite search engine and type PSMDTAG:FAQ  and look at the search results.  (You won’t find a ton because I only did this for a while.)  Notice that the results typically give you most of the FAQ question.  Then try some things like:

psmdtag:faq prompt
psmdtag:faq delegate
psmdtag:faq wmi method
psmdtag:faq base64

Again – you can’t go crazy because I only tagged so many things.  The questions to you are:

1. Is this useful?
2. Is it useful enough for you to participate by tagging your own content or add tags to the comments of other people’s content?
   1. Check THIS out.  I used the comments to tag someone else’s content.

PSMDTAG:FAQ What is a PSMDTAG?
PSMDTAG:FAQ  Will PowerShell have its own folksonomy?

Experiment! Enjoy! Engage!

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx

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