To space, comma or quote, the tagging quandarynorthernvoice, blogs and podcasting, travel — by TDavid @ 5:13 pm PST
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Just arrived back from the Northern Voice conference. I did prepare some day two live blog posts but didn’t actually publish them, and probably won’t in their current incarnation. I’ll either rework them, add some more thoughts from my ink notes or just make part of a more thorough review of the entire event.
Quick take on the event: nothing blew me away there and if asked to compare the two years, the first year was better. There were a few interesting things that I’ll share in more detail after I get some more rest and can process my notes, but I can start with one resonating theme.
Seeing that the last few conferences/events I’ve been to thought it was really important to tag everything — including my nametag — if you are planning on attending an event you might want to sit down and think ahead what tags you would use to describe who you are and what you do online. Unsurprisingly, the words I used were mostly programming-related.
I like checking new things and trying new products/services out but tagging is one I haven’t been able to embrace on the publisher side yet. On the personal side I’ve been using tagging somewhat effectively to replace bookmarking. It works good since I utilyze multiple computers and can share the links in one centralized place, but it requires an internet connection which isn’t as convenient as bookmarks. Yes, I could sync up the web tagged items with a local bookmarking system and that is on my radar of projects to either do myself or hunt down a tool somebody else has done to fit the job.
I’m somewhat stymied on the publisher side of tagging. In blog posts especially tag implementation just seems … messy.
One theme which I heard several times at Northern Voice involved the need for some sort of tagging uniformity. Which way should be used to separate words? Spaces, commas or quotes? Flickr uses spaces to separate words where some others use commas. This is a puzzling issue for new users especially. Most the people polled during one session preferred commas. I do too because commas are natural.
Despite the numbers Kevin Marks and others have supplied about the exponential growth of tagging, I’m still not sold on them. I’ve all but stopped tagging entries on this blog, never used to any serious extent on our other blogs, and only experimented with tagging a few scattered entries. It just looks like keyword clutter to me on the blog entries, especially if you have a blog entry with only a couple short sentences (sometimes there are more tags than words in posts, how does that happen?). I can see tagging that is intertwined with longer posts, but the current common format of tags at the beginning or end just doesn’t look very good to me.
And besides aesthetics, I wonder what readers are thinking about these tags? Do they have any idea what they’re for, how they are used, and most importantly: what is in it for them? If it’s something purely for the author, then I’m more in favor of keeping the tags out of sight. My fear of doing that involves looking like I’m trying to spam the search engines.
We have had a designated tag spot and it’s the meta tags for keywords and if you go back through the history of that one, it became a spammed mess. I have the same concerns for tagging.
Now that tagging has been around, what are your thoughts on using them? If you have a blog and use them, how are you making them fit into your posts naturally without jamming one or more at the beginning or end (space which is already kind of busy)? I realize Technorati and IceRocket, etc picks up categories and uses those as tags which is sort of a silent way of tagging your posts, but I’m talking about situations where you want to describe the content of your posts manually and they go beyond the categorization.
On a scale from 1 (totally uninterested in tagging) to 10 (couldn’t live without tagging, love it) where are you at for both your personal use and publisher use, if applicable?
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I’m not a blogger, but I use del.icio.us to tag at least one site a day. I’ve always had an issue with the tagging system, because if I want to tag something as “funny comic” or “web 2.0″, then I’ve gotta tag it as “funnycomic” and “web2.0″ which, for anyone experienced with the tagging system, isn’t a problem, but I still prefer the idea of sparating tags with commas, or the vertical line, or even periods. That’s my $.02 USD.
Comment by Drakonik — February 12, 2006 @ 6:52 pm PST
I’m totally interested in tagging my blog. I don’t mind the aesthetics so much. It’s rough and gritty like “tagging” a subway. And I think it’s a natrual way to tell readers and search engines what your post is about. But it would be good to have the option to keep the blog clean and still benefit from tagging. So ‘10′ for publisher use.
I tag everything. I tag all of my computer files. I tag my music. I tag my physical stuff too. I think it’s a great way to catalogue all my “stuff”. My imagination thinks in keywords. I’m inspired by keyword flashes the new and interesting connections they make. Another ‘10′ for personal use.
BTW, you got ‘tagged’ by Toby Bloomberg and that’s how I found out about your blog.
Comment by Graham English — February 12, 2006 @ 7:37 pm PST
I’ve been trying to tag my posts as often as I can, most of the time I just forget or don’t know what to tag it with. But as far as standards go, I like to use commas to separate tags and quotes to group two or more words together.
But you also make a good point about the use of tags. I don’t see any resonable way to control tags and there really is no way to prevent a spammer from just inserting a bunch of Technoroti tags on their Blogger page. I think the real use of tagging is to provide a clear subject reference, but I also see that being taken advantage by blog spammers very easily.
Comment by Andrew Ferguson — February 13, 2006 @ 2:18 am PST
Social tagging sucks, using tags for personal organization rocks. My thumbnail opinion.
Comment by Scott — February 13, 2006 @ 11:09 am PST
My blog software (I use Marko’s microblog — http://www.stamcar.com/projekti/microblog/) apparently doesn’t support tagging. I wish it did. I think it might help people find topics on my blog site more easily, since I tend to flit around quit a bit on subject matter. I suppose I could just add them into the text at the top or bottom.
I haven’t used tagging yet for personal organization, and would be interested to learn about the best methods for doing so.
In my limited experience, I like using commas to separate tags, and allowing multi-word tags without quotes.
Comment by Sterling Camden — February 13, 2006 @ 12:46 pm PST
Sterling,
I’d suggest tagging content with tags that make sense to you, without regard for how the rest of the tagging community might be using the tag. Sometimes there is overlap, but don’t concern yourself with making your tags conform to their context.
An example would be a friend of mine that works at IBM. I might tag a picture of him at IBM with the “IBM” tag in Flickr. Now I might also tag a picture of a server with “IBM”. Someone who doesn’t understand my context, might not know why I tagged a person and a computer with “IBM” and it might not help them if they are looking for pictures of a new IBM application. Context, when it comes to tagging, is practically everything.
Comment by Scott — February 13, 2006 @ 12:54 pm PST
Scott, thanks for the suggestions, but by “methods” I wasn’t referring so much to the tags themselves as to the “how”. For instance, what software would one use to tag things on one’s owm hard drive? Or on web sites that don’t specifically employ tagging? Am I just ignorant?
Comment by Sterling Camden — February 13, 2006 @ 2:36 pm PST
Sterling,
hmmmmmm, well I’m no expert in all things tagging. The concept is so new to technology that I’d be suspicious of anyone claiming to be an expert.
As far as tagging things on your hard drive. I’m not aware of anything for current Windows systems. Under OS X 10.4 (Tiger), you can attach Spotlight comments to every file and directory on your hard drive. Which makes tagging the files pretty easy. There are many scripts and applications out there for Spotlight that let you add spotlight comments to multiple files. Windows Vista will come with the ability ( at least I think it’s still in there) to add similar comments and tags to your Windows file system.
As for using tagging with web sites that don’t employ tagging. I’m not sure. I’ve used Delicious to categorize my bookmarks, making it easier for me to find a web site that I saw 4 months ago. Yahoos “My Web” has similar functionality.
Comment by Scott — February 13, 2006 @ 3:57 pm PST
[…] I guess this makes yet a third method of handling multiple word tags: spaces, dashes and no spaces. share/bookmark: MyWeb | del.icio.us | digg it! […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Slashdot adds tagging for subscribers (beta) — March 2, 2006 @ 9:16 am PST
[…] BTW, I noticed earlier Sterling added that long icon bar plugin of share it style apps when he switched over to Wordpress (good move on the switch, mon, now hurry and change out that ugly default template — you deserve better). I thought about that once upon a time and decided against. I think that icon bar is cool the first time you see it but it seems very cluttered in the ensuing posts and nevermind what it does to readers who have no idea what function most of those icons actually perform. I’m not criticizing Sterling or others that use that, I just couldn’t get over that being too much information on each post. Folks who regularly use those type apps already know how to deal with the deluge of web pages they come across which don’t give them a handy way to save them. I don’t care for posts with a bunch of tags at the beginning or end either, which has been one of numerous disappointments with tagging [related: To space, comma, or quote, the tagging quandary] Something else Sterling will like about Wordpres is that any category he defines automatically becomes a tag. I like subtle but effective organization like that. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Six Apart trapped in DDOS symptom of webiverse crossfire — May 4, 2006 @ 9:44 pm PST