Tag Angst

Posted on September 21, 2006 2 Comments

You know how sometimes you have really great intentions, but time constraints just kind of erode them? That’s how I am with my bookmark tagging/organizing. You see, I use the social bookmarking site BlinkList to keep track of web sites that I’ve found useful or plan to visit again. Now, the good folks at BlinkList offer two bookmarklets: One that gives you a chance to type in a bit of an (optional) description and assign some tags and another that saves the link under the tag of “Quick Blinks” with no prompting or input needed. Now obviously, the latter is quite a bit faster. And everyone time I use it, I say to myself, “Self, need to remember to re-tag that this weekend.” Which, of course, never happens. And they just keep piling up…

Decided I should attend some of these Quick Blinked bookmarks tonight. Now, after an hour, I’m down to 158 bookmarks still tagged as “Quick Blinks.” If I can convince myself to tag 10 a night, I’ll be down to none in just over 2 weeks. Ugh. It almost feels like penance.

Now, the BlinkList search will look beyond tags, so it isn’t the end of the world… I can still find stuff if the text I’m searching for is in the title or description. But I can find stuff way better (and faster) if I bother to tag it properly. And hey, call me a squirrel, but I don’t like seeing Quick Blink as the biggest item in my BlinkList tag cloud.

Resolution: I’ve removed the Quick Blink bookmarklet from my browsers. No more uncategorized bookmarks! By gum, if I want to save a link I can surely find half a minute at that moment to toss on a couple tags too, right?

Now here’s a related yet different tagging issue: Should tag names be singular or plural? For instance, I tag a lot of WordPress plugins. In those cases, there’s a minimum of two tags. So “WordPress” is singular and “plugins” is plural. Should it be plural? Semantically, which makes more sense for a tag on links that are about a plugin for some software package? Earlier today, that tag was “plugin” not “plugins” and I renamed it thinking it made more sense this way. Now I’m second-guessing myself.

In the grand scheme of things this isn’t a huge deal… but it’s the kind of thing that can get in to my head and bug me for days. Well, until the next bright shiny distraction pushes it aside at any rate.

Tags: BlinkList, blog, tagcloud, tagging, tags