Quick Question on Tagging
May 16, 2008 · Print This Article
Just a quickie, this: when you are assigning tags to a piece of online content, how do you prefer to segregate different items on the list:
- with spaces - like del.icio.us
- with commas - like WordPress
- with spaces but with multi-word tags in speech marks, like Flickr?
Would be interesting to know people’s thoughts.
I’m not bothered, maybe leaning a little towards the WP version.
A bit of concistancy would be nice though, and would certainly help tagging become easier to understand for some people.
Yeah, consistency is the thing. I like comma-separated too, but I guess it could mean tags becoming unwieldy and too long.
The thing with the space-separated ones, like del.icio.us is that there is then no real convention for multi-word tags - do you just take the spaces out likethisforinstance or do as some people do and use +, - or _ between words. If people aren’t consistent then the whole point of the tags is lost.
Commas. Spaces are a quasi-delimiter, not sufficiently distinct. Apostrophes and quote marks are functionally adequate, but commas are easier to use.
I prefer commas. I don’t like having to make compound tags (e.g. dataportability, socialmedia) in del.ico.us. Commas involve less typing than the quotes marks + spaces approach.
Thanks dp and Paul. Seems the consensus so far is in favour of commas.
I think you know my views, given that I’ve spec’d the next phase development of the IDeA CoP platform to use comma delimitted tagging. Interesting to see other comments though.
Like commas best
Chronicle uses commas and it seems to make sense to me. Hang-over from the seldom-used email Keywords header, perhaps?