Tucson Digital Arts Community

Arrrrgh! I just came up with a ’better’ way to tag things on delicious! Well, at least I think it’s better. Anyone using delicious? See, I tag by using ’term hierarchy.’ Basically, I string tags together from broad to specific (eg, webdev-tools-seo, typography-bestpractice-elements, etc.) I’m not sure if the hierarchy is right all the time, but it helps me narrow down when I’m searching for the tag in Firefox’s del.icio.us addon. After I had been doing this for a long time, I started to see that I get same, if not better, result by typing the ’un-stringed’ tags. I think I started to see that the creators probably meant it this way. I guess I just thought it made no sense to tag something web—it seemed to general. However, if you tag like this ”web tools optimization seo” then you can narrow down when you search. Other things may be tagged ”web tools green”, or ”web optimization article”…delicious will filter to the bookmarks that share the tags in common. This is a lot handier when you want to filter stuff. Since delicious treats a continuous text string as one single tag, if you’ve used the tag tools only within a string of tags (eg, webdev-tools), you will not be able to filter based on tools only (as in a URL like delicious.com/username/tag/tools/). While, if you had used it singly, you can mix the word tools with any other, including webdev (as in delicious.com/username/tag/tools+webdev). I guess what I’m trying to say is that delicious is more shareable and versatile if you tag with simple words and not ’hierarchical strings’. Of course, tagging with hierarchical strings makes the collection a bit more browsable when filtering. For example, I can type ’webdev-’ and this will filter all tags that start with ’webdev-’ from there, I can scroll by subtopic, until I find the correct topic. This still leaves me guessing a bit about which way is better. Since I don’t have a collection of ’shortly’ tagged bookmarks, I can test. I also find it hard to picture. How do you tag?