ifyoucantreadthisyouareprobablytaggingonflickrnotdelicious

Tags are great, but a large list of multi-word tags can become almost unreadable on services like Flickr. For example, I have just a few tags on the Zoinger Network Flickr site, which currently are: Audiovox, Audiovox SMT5600, camera phone, power supply, SMT5600, Thermaltake W0014RU and www.zoinger.com. More specifically, that’s what I would like the list of tags to look like. Unfortunately on Flickr, they don’t allow characters like dashes or periods or even capitalization in their tags. So instead of a nice, readable list of tags, you get this mess:

If you didn’t know that Thermaltake was a brand of power supplies, you probably have trouble decoding the tag thermaltakew0014ru into Thermaltake — the brand manufacturer — and W0014RU — the power supply model.

Fortunately, del.icio.us does allow dashes, periods and most other QWERTY characters as well as capitalization in their tags. In the ZoingerPosts del.icio.us account that archives all the newer Zoinger posts, I’m using non-letter characters and capitalization to help make the tags much more readable.

For example, I’m using periods to separate individual words in multi-word tags as in tagged.bundles. For product names, I use the dash to separate the brand name from the product name as in Audiovox-SMT5600. Obviously in the previous example, del.icio.us allows me to capitalize the A in Audiovox as well as the SMT portion of the model number. To separate a person’s first name from their last name I use the underscore character as in Jon_Udell. And finally for WordPress categories, I prepend cat:: before the category name as in cat::Del.icio.us

I may end up changing this scheme as time goes on, but so far I’m very pleased with the improved readability of the tags. It’s quite simple to pick out product names from a long list of tags by simply looking for dashes in the tags. Humans are very visual creatures (hence our color eye site and relatively poor sense of smell), so we’re fairly adept at picking out dashes, periods and other characters on a page. I’m hoping that as more and more services start using tags that they allow users to create methods to make tags more readable as del.icio.us has.