ryan.freebern.org

Tagging is all the rage. Every site worth its salt these days allows you to tag stuff. Whether it’s your blog, your bookmarks, your books, your music, or your friends, you can add tags to them, usually with just a few clicks and keypresses. What a fantastic way to organize collections and make finding stuff easier! And yet I still see people totally missing the point and using tags incorrectly. I’m an obsessive organizer at heart, and an infovore (voracious consumer of information), so watching people fail to classify information in a useful way makes me cry a little.

What is tagging?

Tagging is classifying things by adding simple, descriptive words or short phrases to them. Ideally, the tags you add encapsulate the key ideas and attributes of something. For example: if I were to tag my pants, I would add “jeans” to all the jeans, “shorts” to the shorts, and “cargo” to the cargoes — some of them would have combinations, like “jeans” and “shorts” — and then I might add colors, like “blue” or “black” or “khaki”. Then when I want to put pants on (which rarely happens, but bear with me) I would tell my robot butler “Show me the pants tagged ’shorts’ and ‘khaki’,” and the robot butler would pull out the pants that match those tags, and I would be able to choose from that selection, instead of having to look through all of my pants at once.

Figure 1: Pants with appropriate tags

How do I decide if a particular tag is appropriate?

Here is a simple guide to deciding if a tag is appropriate. Place the tag into the blank in each of the following sentences. If it makes sense in any of them, it is appropriate.

• “This item is a/an ________.”
• “This item is ________.”
• “This item has to do with ________.”

For instance, I am looking at an alarm clock. I am considering tagging it with the term “bonobos”. Let me see…

• “This item is a/an bonobos.” FALSE: IT IS AN ALARM CLOCK
• “This item is bonobos.” ALSO FALSE: IT IS NOT BONOBOS
• “This item has to do with bonobos.” FALSE AGAIN: BONOBOS ARE AFRAID OF ALARM CLOCKS

Hence, I can be fairly certain that my alarm clock should not be tagged “bonobos”. Let’s try again, this time with the term “waking”.

• “This item is a/an waking.” WHAT
• “This item is waking.” NO
• “This item has to do with waking.” DING DING DING WE HAVE A WINNER

How do I use tags on this particular website I am looking at?

I don’t know, because chances are I have not used that particular website, since there are currently umpty-bajillion websites that support tagging. But, smart person you are, I bet you can figure it out if you look around a little. Does the website have a “help” or “FAQ” link? That might tell you. Or maybe near the “tags” area is a little question mark you can click on to learn about their tagging function.

That said, here are some things to pay attention to:

• When you type in tags, do you use spaces to separate them (like “cargo shorts khaki”) or commas (like “cargo, shorts, khaki”)?
• If you want to use a multi-word tag, do you surround it with quotes like “hulk smash”) or do you use underscores (like hulk_smash)?

Exercises

1. So there’s this guy, right? Let’s call him Bob. He reads a story on a website. The story is about robots and flying turtles and the end of the world. It’s a really great story, so he adds it to his bookmarks on a particular social bookmark website. The website says “For multi-word tags, use underscores between the words. Separate multiple tags with spaces.”

Which set of tags should Bob type?

1. robots flying turtles apocalypse
2. robots, flying turtles, apocalypse
3. robots flying_turtles apocalypse
4. bear hunny christopher_robin

The answer is 3.

2. On the system above, Bob wants to tag something so that his friend Alice knows it’s something she would be interested in. He types the tag for alice. What’s wrong with this?

Answer: Since the system separates tags with spaces, typing for alice will result in two tags, “for” and “alice”. What the heck does the tag “for” mean? It means nothing! You can tell because the three-sentence test for the tag “for” gives us three nonsense sentences. Bob should have typed for_alice.

3. Bob has read a news story about global climate change and Al Gore. He has saved it and tagged it “godzilla atlatl phonetic_spelling”. What should we do?

Answer: Either of the two answers below is appropriate.

• Politely email Bob explaining that his tagging is fallacious and giving him the URL of this post.
• Punch Bob in the face.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, Mar 07, 2007 at 4:20 pm and is tagged information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.