To space, comma or quote, the tagging quandary |
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?
