Tagging Is Too Much Work

I love the idea of tagging and emergent knowledge organization.  I use del.icio.us religiously to keep track of posts I read in various categories.  I like to see what's happening on a variety of Technorati tags.  But I always forget to tag my own posts.

Tagging is too much work.

I want a cheat sheet sidebar I can drop onto my blog with pre-coded tags I can simply click on.  Or maybe a drop down menu built into TypePad I can populate with my favorite tags.  I'd like others to be able to tag my own posts (hey, share the workload).  Until I have at least one of the first two, my tagging will always be sporadic and half-hearted.

Now we have tagging silos all over the place.  Technorati, del.icio.us, digg, furl, flickr...arrgh.  I want it to be simpler.  The ubertag, the master of tags, the tag search engine.  Something. Help!

Comments

[Quinton]

Couldnt agree more Elizabeth.
We had a very interesting conversation about tagging after this very informative analysis of tagging..

http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html

[Tris Hussey]

Elizabeth,

I couldn't agree with you more. Tagging is still too techie. So this is why we put a Technorati button in Qumana for one-click tagging.

Let me know if you'd like to give it a whirl.
T

[Fritz]

Give this Javascript tagging tool a shot and then let me know how it can be changed or improved. This is the tool I use to tag my posts.

http://www.masoner.net/tagme.html

[Phil Gomes]

My issue with tagging is that it really does need to be constrained somehow. There's too much potential for a "toe-may-toe / toe-mah-toe" issue.

[Kevin Dugan]

Coming from the early days of using the Blogger platform, I am used to doing light coding to my posts. That said, I still have a word doc I wind up cutting and pasting tags into my posts. It's still extra work, but I've noticed an anecdotal difference in my traffic logs.

Phil brings up a good point though. A bit of tag abuse and I could be wind up in searches as a top site on knitting.

[Elizabeth Albrycht]

I do have a text file with the html code for some. It really isn't a problem of coding it, as I do know a bit of HTML coding as I took an online course in it a few years ago. I have added a bookmarklet to the tool Fritz linked to above and will give it a whirl. It is more of the time it takes. Not just to add the tag, but to think about what the tag should be. Is it public relations or publicrelations or PR? Or all three? (I hear you Phil!) Just about every post of mine has to do with PR in some way, but should I tag every post? I see people with 10 tags for every post. That seems like overkill. I should do some research into what tags are the most important, but I haven't had the time. And that will probably change every month.

Sigh. Maybe I am just lazy. As a PR person I should certainly spend some more time on groking the Technorati tags I should be using. But they never seem to really work anyways, so I just haven't bothered. Maybe once their system is solid I will take the time.

I am not going to switch platforms at this point, so I am hoping something one-click-like is added to TypePad in the near future.

Thanks for commenting everyone!

[Scott Baradell]

I don't get paid enough to tag ;)

[Morgan McLintic]

Hi Elizabeth - my blog is hosted by Typepad as well, and that means the categories you use, also correlate to Technorati tags, so that is one method to use without the coding.

Not sure if it works well on a PC, but you might also consider a blog post engine such as Ecto, which allows you to tag each post from a personalized list of tags. This means that if you don't have a specific category to create the tag, eg you don't have a 'podcasting' one, but you might write about it often, you can simply check the box and it's done.

Doesn't solve the lexicon issue, but does solve the laziness one. At least for me.

[Philippe Borremans]

Hi Elizabeth,

Here's a tag search engine worth a try: http://creative-mobs.com/gutentag

Kind regards, Phil

[Elizabeth Albrycht]

Moving to a posting engine like Ecto might be a good solution for me. I generally just post directly into the online interface. I did try a couple of posting engines awhile ago, but just didn't like them. They were early versions, so very buggy. I am probably going to switch to a Apple Powerbook soon, however, and don't want to spend the money on another piece of software. So, in the meantime, I'll probably add a couple of new categories after I figure out what would be the appropriate ones on Technorati.

Thanks for all of your advice!

[Elizabeth Albrycht]

BTW: Guten Tag rocks!

[Chris Messina]

Hi Elizabeth,

I think you're going to pleasantly surprised when Flock becomes publicly available. We're addressing this issue head on -- pulling tags into the browser and letting you apply them to your bookmarks, photos and blog posts, offering autocompletion from your most common used tags.

The UI is still under development, but we do have a very functional beta that we'll be showing off at Web2.0. Feel free to drop me a note if you'd like more info: chris at flock dot com.

And I also love the idea of other people (most likely friends and family) tagging your posts -- just like they can on Flickr. I'll talk to Matt Mullenweg (WordPress Matt) and see if we can get that into WordPress.com...

[Productivity Blog]

You might checkout ecto. It has exactly what you described and it works with typepad.

[Jeremy Pepper]

It's funny, because on the Businessweek tepid blog, I had commented that tagging means nothing to the mainstream public - http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2005/10/do_the_giants_w.html#comments .

At the end of the day, isn't it THEM who matters the most? I do my half attempts at tagging merely from cutting and pasting the Technorati tags I use, but the fact is I don't use Delicious, and I'll likely not put the time and effort into it. Is it worth the time?