Do You Tag?
I had an excellent lunch-time conversation with a few mates from here at TrustMe Security as well as Derek Hatchard from ArdentDev. So good was the conversation that I thought I’d bring the underlying question (in my mind) to the web and try to get some feedback.
At issue were the fundamentally different styles of tagging that we use. Although the differences in the end result of our methodologies is minimal, I think I can learn by understanding them. My main motivation is to find the best possible tagging methodology for myself while making my tags relevant for others to find the content.
So my questions are:
- How do you tag your content?
- What, if any, questions do you ask yourself when determining tags for your content?
- Do these questions differ based on the tag provider? (e.g. is your methodology fundamentally different when tagging for digg, delicious, you own blog, etc.?).
For example, when I tag for del.icio.us I sometimes pretend I’m telling somebody about the site I am tagging and use tags based on how I’d describe it to them. I think I am likely to use those words/phrases again when searching for this bookmark in the future. Until recently I didn’t really understand any other way of doing it. See? I need some feedback!
3 Responses to “Do You Tag?”:Posted by chris on June 25, 2008 1:13 pm
Posted by Blaise Alleyne on June 26, 2008 3:16 am
Posted by Mike Mullen on June 26, 2008 7:44 am
Yeah, i suppose you’re right Mike. Like always.
Hey Mike!
One of the things I’ve been doing a lot recently with my tags is making use of the streams they create. For example, I threw together a quick page to keep my family/friends updated on my trip (I’m in Canberra now) by grabbing the RSS feeds for the ‘australia’ tag on Flickr, del.icio.us and my blog (WordPress). On the music and tech portions of my site, I do something similar.
Not sure what I’m really trying to say, and I’m no expert on tagging, but I’ve found the streams created from certain tags to be the most useful feature of tagging recently and I guess that heavily affects my thinking when I tag things. I’ll often create transient tags, but I’m much more conscious of trying to use some consistent ones.
*shrugs*
Hey Blaise!
Thanks for the comment. I hope you are having fun in your travels.
It seems I am in the minority as most people tend to be using a small(ish) set of very consistent tags in order to group more content with fewer tags. I find it very interesting indeed.
Perhaps my, ‘loads of tags to try and remember one of the right ones when searching’ method is indicative of my general disorganization.