Get Everything Done

Apropos of the discussion of tags that has popped up in this forum: I've never got along well with tags, and this: http://www.tekka.net/10/tags.html may explain why (warning: longish).

This is Mark Bernstein's summary of the article (See http://www.markbernstein.org )

"Bottom line: Marshall takes a painstaking look at all the tags applied to all the images of one particular sort of flickr image. One might expect to find an informal, emergent taxonomy; what we actually find is, pretty much, nothing we can use. The words people put in picture titles and comments are actually better tags than the words they use as tags.

The study could be repeated on more images, and in additional contexts. It might be bad luck. But if it’s a repeatable result — and I think we all know it is — then we’re going to have to rethink a lot of our Web 2.0 rhetoric. Folksonomy is an illusion.

Commentary: Sven Portst thinks it’s pseudo-scientific, but also correct. Mark Stoneman finds it “amusing and informative”. Paul Mison hopes that tags can be salvaged for personal use. Several good and thoughtful delicious bookmark notes, including Leslie Orchard (thinks Marshall wrong, but having trouble saying why); in fact, one of the better delicious collections I've seen.

Leslie Orchard then follows up, arguing that tags work for him in delicious, though he doesn't find them very useful on flickr or elsewhere. Repeating the study for delicious seems to be a natural direction, and that would be useful. He also suggests that delicious tags are more useful than flickr's because they're the only user-supplied metadata, where flickr also has title and description."

imho, tags should never be a must,
if you use tags for some items, it is because you feel they'll ease some personal needs for retrieval.

They do not have to be entered as "Tags: ". They are just words you're carefull to write in your item wording.

Seed for search and immediate extracting (current items for a person, for a coming event, for the use of a ressource, etc)

I think that the only rule whatever system we ultimately use for search and retrieval in any context is that it is consistent. I aim to use consistent file structures, consistent naming conventions and consistent procedures. I think that holds true at whatever level of detail or simplicity we need. If I need to search for a file then, even if I do not know what it was called, provided I initially named it I will know the structure of it's name and/or location and so be able to find it relatively easily.