Creating and Sharing Tags using Del.icio.us

My tag usage has evolved over time, I currently have over 1,100 pages tagged in del.icio.us. Having tagged so many pages I've established some personal practices and categories. For example, I generally use one word tags and spell them out with lowercase letters. If one word won't work I invent a compound word like "projectmanagement." I've opted for this format because of my preferred way of viewing my tags. Tags can be listed out alphabetically. In the standard list view each tag includes a number to indicate how many items are assigned to each tag. But I prefer the "cloud" view. The cloud view shows all my tags in a running paragraph. It uses color and size to indicate usage. The more I use a particular tag, the bigger and brighter it displays in the cloud. It's a fascinating picture of my tagging interests. I've adopted the single word, lowercase practice because I find the tag cloud easier to read when all the tags are single, lowercase words.

Over time I've had to adjust my tag usage. I used to have pairs of similar tags for the same purpose, one singular and one plural. At first when I tagged examples of beautiful typefaces I'd use the tag "fonts" but then I began adopting the practice of using the singular for my tags. Thankfully del.icio.us has great tag management tools so I was able to easily re-tag all occurrences of "fonts" to "font" in one fell swoop.

The del.icio.us autocomplete feature also helps me keep my tag cloud relatively clean. As I begin typing it displays my matching tags--so my poor typing and spelling skills rarely create tag typos.

If you haven't explored the world of tagging you might be thinking "so what? a website version of browser bookmarks, interesting but not exactly revolutionary." Adding descriptions and tags to bookmarks and using an online service instead of the browser is neat, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

As soon as I moved my bookmarking to del.icio.us I realized that my bookmarks weren't just my bookmarks anymore. The default state of a del.icio.us bookmark is "shared." While you can set any bookmark to private status, the intention of a site like del.icio.us is to share. I admit that during my first few days of bookmarking, I set most of my links to "private." But I soon realized the benefits of sharing, and I got used to the idea my bookmarks aren't exactly state secrets. And by keeping my bookmarks and tags open, I can access them from anywhere on any computer--not only that, I can refer others to them as well. I was giving an interview for How magazine last month for their self-promotion annual about advertising agencies and their own websites. Lisa Hazen, the author of the article, wanted some examples of agency sites that I thought did a good job. Since I have a category for "agencysite" in del.icio.us I pointed her to del.icio.us/ericholter/agencysite where she could see the sites I'd tagged and a brief description of what I thought about them. Want to see what I've tagged recently about web based office application alternatives? Go to del.icio.us/ericholter/weboffice.

The public nature of tagging bookmarks on del.icio.us makes sharing information so much easier.

When I tag an item "weboffice," del.icio.us not only adds that tag to my collection of links, it also mixes my use of that tag with the world's. So in the same way that you can go to del.icio.us/ericholter/weboffice, you can also go to del.icio.us/tag/weboffice and get a list of every page that has been tagged "weboffice" by everyone else.

If this were merely a long list of links it would not be very helpful. But two elements add a lot of value. First, it displays all the other tags people have used, in addition to "weboffice" for these pages. In this case you'd see that some people used the word "webapplication" for these same pages. Viewing items tagged "webapplication" may lead to valuable discoveries.

The second helpful element is seeing how many other people have saved the same link. The collaborative nature of tagging not only leads to discoveries of shared content, but it also adds the element of recommendation. Just recently I tagged a new site that I heard about through Read/Write Web about an annotation web service called "Awesome Highlighter." I added my "annotation" tag to it. I have about eight other sites tagged "annotation" but I wanted to see what other people had tagged "annotation" so I clicked the "all" link. I found a site called Fleck. Fleck has been saved by 1054 other people. Clearly Fleck is another popular annotation service. I added it to my tags for future review. (Now it's saved by 1055 other people).