Tag all the things

[nancylebov]

I thought I'd find my posts about cooking, but I mostly don't tag-- occasionally I do some back tagging, but that only up to 2005.

So, I'm doing some tagging, and realized it's hardly an objective process. How finely do I want to divide subjects? What's important in a post, especially since some of my posts are about abstract topics?

Anyone care to talk about their approach to tagging?

The title is based on this brilliant cartoon.

Comments

[siderea]

Why does having an abstract topic make something hard to tag?

The most important thing is that your system work for retrieval for you, presumably. In which case, you're trying to answer the question, "when I want to find this post again, what term will leap to mind?"

In addition to topic tags, there are form tags, which indicate what kind of a thing the post is. Two I use are "mememe" (for memes I participated in) and "essay" (for big original articles I write) so I can find things on that basis.

[redrose]

I tag my book posts in general, my book posts by year, my craft stuff by type of craft, ideas, posts made of links, posts made of lists, and posts for memes.

[infintysquared.livejournal.com]

I have a somewhat random aggregation of tags for topics that pop up regularly in my journal entries. Then, when I post, I tag with whatever seems appropriate... Or not. "Zeitgeist" and "Pirate" probably get more random usage than they deserve.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Coarse sort over fine sort; the latter takes too much time. I don't tag all that much, anyway.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I started tagging pretty early on. I just tag whatever's in the post, and I make up new posts as I go along. I thought I would eventually hit a limit or something but there seems to be no limit for paid users anyway?

What I need to do is to go back and fix the junk tags that happen when I make a typo while tagging and don't notice it till long after I've saved the post.

I believe you could find absolutely anything I've written since 2006 at least by using the tags page.

Because I have so many tags, you can't really use the tag cloud: the print is too tiny. But if you go to the tag page, it's really usable.

Just don't search "head thing:" there's too many posts with that tag.

But why do I tag so aggressively? I don't really have an answer except that I like good indexes and a good tag page is like a good index.

[madfilkentist]

People could be using tags for three things: (1) To look for similar posts, (2) to exclude topics they don't want to see me writing about, or (3) to list the only topics they care to see me writing about. For the tags to be useful for any of these purposes, they have to be reasonably limited in number. Currently I have 50, of which I've used maybe five just once and should get rid of.

[avram]

I find that my biggest difficulties in tagging are caused by my failure to have decided at some point once and for all whether I want to use the singular or plural forms of nouns for my tags --- "photo" or "photos". I'd advise you to make that decision now, and stick with it.

It's not as big a problem with platforms (like Delicious) that give you an easy way to merge tags, but I don't think LJ is one of them.