Wired has an article today on tagging tips from "top taggers" (everyone really will get their 15 minutes, I swear), which I found amusing because I don't follow any of the suggestions. E.g., "it is better to combine a lot of simple tags than to dream up complicated new ones" — oops. I'm guilty of employing excessively hyphenated tags. Also, "I try not to overlap tags which have the same meaning" — again, guilty as charged. I'll tag "blog," "blogs," "blogging," and "blogosphere"... for the same link, more often than not. "Picking keywords likely to be already used by other del.icio.us users" is a good tip. How many of you employ any of these tag practices? How many even have a conscious "tag practice"? Have you got other tips and tricks the rest of us wannabe top taggers might find useful (we're the indie rock tagger equivalent, yo!)?
Tag tips
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(Page 1)2. I think that advice from Wired forgets an important point: who do you tag for? for yourself or for other folks?
When I tag for myself, yes I follow the KISS principle of keeping things simple. The goal, in that case, is to find the information I stored. However, I sometimes tag for other people, like when I post photos to flickr. In that case I use a lot of redundancy (WTC, twin-towers, twin towers, worltradecenter), as what I want is to reach a wider audience.
3. The problem with keeping the tags too simple and non-redundant is you'll exclude searchers who are searching on the "wrong" term. If you tag "blogs" the person searching for "blogging" won't find it, and isn't the practice of tagging all about making content more discoverable?
Yahoo's MyWeb2.0 actively encourages the use of multiple tags by suggesting variations on the page's theme in the "suggested" tags.
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Carole M.
1. I don't follow any of these rules either. Perhaps they are more specific to del.icio.us? After all, on del.icio.us you have to use single words for tags. In other words, keyword phrases are not allowed. Well, no wonder that the tagging behavior then says that the most active taggers use simple, single words. On other engines like ours at www.blinklist.com, we see lots of people take advantage of using keyword phrases. Mike
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Mike