December 15th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
I use Del.icio.us extensively to bookmark all my sites so that I can access it anywhere. Realized lately that I have not been using it efficiently at all. I found this out the hard way when I recently wanted to search for a bookmark (I knew I saved) but couldn’t find it — a classic sign that I was not using it properly. When you are spending more than 2-3 minutes trying to search for a bookmark and you can’t find it, there is definitely a problem.
Looking at the way I use delicious, I found that
1) I was under tagging i.e. not placing tags on some of the links I saved
2) I was over tagging i.e. placing too many tags on links without any regard to whether there was a previous tag that it could be categorized under
Contrary to many beliefs, I think placing too many tags on a link can hinder you as it creates more clutter and makes it harder to categorize. My reasoning is, I’d rather have 50 detailed specific tags rather than 1000 that I have to sift through.
3) I was not classifying the tags properly i.e. tags should have been more detailed and precise than general
4) I was not categorizing my tags and not taking advantage of the “bundle tags” option (found in the “settings” area when logged in)
5) there were a lot of repetitious and misspelled tags that could be deleted or combined with another tag e.g. “web services”, “service”, “services”, “managment”, “engineerng”
Hindsight is always 20/20 and I could have saved myself a lot of clutter and disorganization if I meticulously adhered to some tagging rules instead of *tagging blindly*.
So the result of my past actions? 630 links and bookmarks that are improperly categorized and tagged. When I wanted to search for something, the whole bookmarking system worked against me than for me.
In addition to retagging links, I have decided to utilize the “bundle tag” option too and created main categories i.e. as a high level tag that governs all mini tags. Also came up with a rule of thumb that when tagging something — it should not have more than 2-3 tags.
As an example, I’ve created a main category (or tag bundle) called “business” and changed all tagged links to reflect a more detailed subcategory header like “web designers”, “advertising”, “marketing”, “printers”, “voip”. I am trying to stray away from tagging a link with multiple *minor* related tags as one can certainly go overboard with tagging a link.
Therefore, for a link like Jooce, I’ll tag it as “ajax”, “utilities” and “tools”, bundle it under “Web2″ and resist adding tags like “os”, “desktop”, “socialnetworking”, “social_networking”, “collaboration” etc. although it is related.
So instead of looking like this (with unbundled tags) …
… I intend to make it look like this, with main headers (bundled tags) which govern the sub/ mini tags.
My main objective is to make Del.icio.us work for me and to be able to find links/ bookmarks faster (instead of digging through a barrage of links). That should be what tags/ tagging is all about — somehow I have lost that along the way.
This reorganization will probably be a constant work in progress but when it is all done, I’ll be able to use Del.icio.us to its full potential.
I’m sure the way I did it is one of the many different ways you can organize tags.
How do you organize your Del.icio.us tags?
4 Responses to “Organizing Del.icio.us tags”
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yoshi said: @ 9:14 pm
December 15th, 2007
Personally I could never see the use of delicious as I had already had things like blogrolling or my linklist module that I made for EE. But then again I never used the social aspect of delicious I suppose.
All my bookmarking I do within firefox, which I have synchronized on every computer that I have using firefox. But this is less than ideal than delicious since this assumes that a computer I’m using has to have firefox.
I think I’ll have to take another look at delicious, and see what the deal is. Bundled tags, that sounds interesting.
kristarella said: @ 9:56 am
December 28th, 2007
Nice! I hadn’t really looked at bundles. I usually just try to apply tags that I’ve already used. I only have about 40 bookmarks at the moment and I know there’s one misspelled one that I need to fix. It’s not too bad, but it could be more specific. At this fairly young stage of my delicious bookmarking I can go through and fix the tags fairly easily.
The Foo said: @ 6:19 pm
December 28th, 2007
@kristarella
you’re in a better position such that you don’t have much to organize — mine’s a huge organization project! i’ve got half done already, so it’s not that bad… i’m not in any hurry… just want to do it right.
Ricardo Cabral said: @ 9:51 pm
June 7th, 2008
I’ve just written a web tool for cleaning your del.icio.us tags: it can detect and merge your duplicate tags automatically. Available at http://delicious.isnotworking.com/