Tagging conventions and hive organization

March 9th, 2009 •
Tags: organization, tag, tagging, tags

When the excellent social bookmarking site Delicious launched in 2003, it re-branded an old idea about categorizing and organizing data—namely tagging. Tagging is basically the same concept as keywords, but somehow the rebranding makes it seem more friendly and accessible. Delicious provided users with a system that made tagging easy and gave users a way to exploit this organization allowing them to browse tags to find sites and pages of interest.

With tagging comes debate about how best to utilize the tags to the benefit of the community. In the summer of 2007, Tagamac—a blog about utilizing tagging on the Macintosh platform—wrote a post outlining a set of general tagging conventions that can be applied to any tagging system. The post excited me, and I began religiously putting these tenets into practice. The conventions as laid out in the post are simple:

1. Be succinct
2. Use lowercase tags
3. Use singular words

A couple of months back, I realized this system wasn’t really working for me. The realization came from my own habits in searching Delicious for content. First, let me say that Delicious is a fantastic search tool. Since Google uses an algorithm to return search results, it can be gamed and isn’t always accurate. Delicious having user-generated tags is much more accurate. If I browse through a tag on Delicious, I know some user has looked at each of these sites and decided to give it that tag. It’s much more reliable than an algorithm no matter how sophisticated. Needless to say, I often use Delicious to find resources. I noticed that when I searched Delicious, I didn’t assume that others followed the conventions laid out in the Tagamac post which I myself followed. In fact, I couldn’t assume that… at least not with any success.

The author of these guidelines has an admirable goal. By setting out rigid guidelines for tag use, it would make tagging more useful to those who use the organization to find things while also making it easier for taggers to tag a piece of content. The problem may be that tagging is more of an organic activity. People tend not to dwell much on composing tags. It’s almost word association in which the tagger asks, “What does this make me think of?”

I want to address each of the three guidelines in turn. Succinctness is without a doubt important and is encouraged by most tagging systems. Tags are often limited to a single word by using the space as a delimiter. For example, if I bookmark a site in Delicious and want to tag it hardware, tutorial, and diy, I simply type each of those words in the tag box with spaces between like this: “hardware tutorial diy”. If I decide I also want to tag it “how to,” I can’t just type that into the tag box. Rather than adding a single “how to” tag, the item would be tagged “how” and “to”. Instead, I have to either butt the words together or use a hyphen to avoid their being split into two distinct tags. This automatically discourages tags with multiple words and, although there are times it is appropriate (such as the aforementioned scenario), multi-word tagging in general is not desirable or very useful. Using lowercase tags is a reasonable guideline, but most systems are case-insensitive. Why even worry if people searching tags will not see a difference? The last guideline is the most problematic: singularity. It is sometimes difficult to decide which form of a word to use when tagging. A simple rule like “Never use plural words,” would be great if everyone followed it all the time. The problem comes when only 10% of taggers follow the guideline all the time while the rest use whichever form of the word pops into their heads at the given time or whichever form seems more appropriate given the circumstance.

I propose an alternate method: the shotgun approach. Use every form of a relevant word that comes to mind when tagging an item. It may sound a bit like overkill, but consider the stakes: as a Delicious user, I want to find sites about games. I come to Delicious and view the bookmarks tagged “games” to the exclusion of anything that is tagged only “game” or “gaming“. Because of the simple fact that, when I ask myself, “What am I looking for?” my brain replies “games” rather than “game”, I will miss out on the benefits of any resources you have tagged “game”. What is lost by tagging an item with both plural and singular forms of a word? A few seconds at most. If I have a new bookmark that I want to benefit the most people, I will want to tag it with as many synonyms as possible to reach the widest audience. My tag shotgun will sacrifice accuracy to hit a wide range of users with my chosen tags. I can apply this tenet to more than just plurality. In terms of the example given in the previous paragraph, tagging a tutorial with “tutorial tutorials howto how2 how-to diy” will be much more effective to users than giving it any one of those. Even though my tag cloud will look a bit messier, I have provided more value with my post.

This method actually better exploits the advantages of the tag model of organization. For so many years, computers have been dependent upon the hierarchical folder structure for organization imposing a strict one-to-one ratio. We needed to decide the one location that would be the easiest place to find an item and hope we could reason that out the same way when we were later trying to find it. Tags grant us the flexibility or giving an unlimited number of descriptive words to an item to make it easy to find later regardless of how we decide to describe it.

Organizing Twitter with hashtags

January 28th, 2009 • 11 comments
Tags: hashtags, tagging, twitter

The use of hashtags is a valuable skill for serious Twitter users. They aren’t really very difficult to grasp and use, and they really pay off. The challenge is to educate as many people as possible about the use of hashtags so that their use becomes more widespread, and they will be more valuable to everyone in the community.

You may have seen a user include a number sign (#) directly followed by a word in one of their tweets. This is a hashtag in use. The user is tagging his tweet with that word. These tags are linked by most Twitter clients to the search page for that word which will find for you other tweets with the same tag. This is often used in the case of large events. Livebloggers create a hashtag, inform others, and use it on every tweet that is related to the event. For example, the hashtag for the inauguration was #inaug09. Keep in mind there is nothing magical about that particular tag except that it links to a search for other tweets with the tag included. The tag could just have easily been #inauguration; in fact, it was. Some users decided on the tag #inaug09 while others used the tag #inauguration. I would probably favor the former since it is a little shorter while still clear, but one is just as valid as the other.

There is no process associated with creating a hashtag. Just include it in a post, and it is created. It’s value will come mostly from others using it. However, even if you are the only user to ever use a hashtag, it can still have immense value. My wife (her Twitter is @tiffypooh in case you’re wondering) was recently captivated by the We Are One inaugural celebration. She could have wasted space in each tweet to specify the event she was tweeting about, or she could have left it ambiguous and just included the information she wanted to get across. Instead, she created a hashtag (#weareone) and included that in every post. Not only was this a way to organize Twitter as a whole (at least if others used her tag), but it was a short way to let her readers know what she was talking about. This eases the pain of having to duplicate so much information in each little 140-character message.

Here is my suggested use of hashtags. This is a pretty open-ended concept so there are certainly other ways to use it. Use them however you wish, but if you don’t know what to do with them, try following these steps:

1. Check to see if there is already a hashtag for your topic. Hashtags become more valuable as more people use them. Don’t create a hashtag unless there aren’t any for what you’re talking about or you really think the ones that exist are terrible. If a good one exists, simply write your post and include it somewhere. If a hashtag does not exist…
2. Come up with a good hashtag for your topic. It should be short but easily recognizable even by a user who hasn’t been told explicitly its meaning.
3. Introduce your hashtag by telling your followers what it is for and asking them to use it in their messages on the same subject. Be sure you actually include the hashtag in this message.
4. Write your tweets on the subject and include the tag. You may include it in the context of the message like this: “I’m so excited about the #weareone inaugural celebration!” Alternately, you may just want to tack it on to the end like this: “The mix of people and performers is so ecclectic. I love that so many different people are excited! #weareone”

Hashtags are incredibly useful They are currently used only by a small percentage of the Twitter community. Luckily, a small percentage of the Twitter community is quite a lot of people. This means you can still get a lot out of using tags both in your own tweets and to find topics you want to see on Twitter.

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