Organisation and Tags and Stuff

[madshutterbug]

Do you use tags? Both of the blog sites I use, as well as at least one of the photography hosting sites, allow 'tags' as a means to help organise the entries. Want to read about my meanderings through the world of photography? Should be a tag on the entry which is a link, click on it and read the photography meanderings.

Except...

I think I've far too many tags, either place where I'm doing much writing. Not going to look to the photography sites just yet. One Dreamwidth there are 189 or so listed, and on Live Journal nearly 600, and both places the majority are single use tags. One time only, and how often is someone going to track a single use item? Except...

Maybe they will become multiple use items, as time goes by. Still, I've sorted through on both places a bit recently to cut things down to the numbers mentioned. Things like would a plural noun serve as well as a singular one (portrait, portraits), or even more plainly are there typographical errors, mispellings in the tags? If so... combine and eliminate. Helped. Now I'm down to deciding if (hundreds) of single-time use tags are worth keeping or not.

Do you use tags?

Comments

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

I briefly started using tags, but never kept it up. Too bad, it would have been helpful in finding old entries, but oh well!

[madshutterbug.livejournal.com]

It is handy for finding old entries. Also for visitors, eh, when they may want to follow some concept one wrote about. Which is why I ask myself, how many single-use concepts are going to be followed up upon?

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Absolutely I use tags! They are invaluable for finding old entries on a particular topic. However, if you look thru my tags, you'll find that almost none of them are single-use; I tend to think in categories, plus I have a "chatter" tag which serves as a version of "miscellaneous". You might consider doing something like that for at least some of your single-use tags.

When I first changed to a layout which allowed tags, I had to spend about a week going back thru old entries and tagging them. I consider it to have been time well spent.

[singingnettle.livejournal.com]

Nah.

[madshutterbug.livejournal.com]

Ah, but I will wager you do use them with your photographs.

[singingnettle.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do. Although right now, having just gotten a Mac, I'm sort of between filing systems and disgruntled about it.