Flickr has tags. And so does del.icio.us… and the new My Web 2.0 from Yahoo!… and so on, and so on, and so on. If you use more than one of these services, you soon find out that you’ve got tags seemingly everywhere. This presents a big problem: How do you keep track — or let along sync — all of your tags?

Ugh… for example, to tag things related to my Audiovox SMT5600 Smartphone, I use the tag Audiovox-SMT5600 on del.icio.us, but on Flickr for some reason I use two tags smt5600 and audiovoxsmt5600 (and remember, no capital letters on Flickr).

It would sure be nice if there was one place were you could manage all of your tags on all these desperate services.

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.

Since I moved my blog over to WordPress from MovableType, I’ve been using the social bookmarking service del.icio.us to tag and organize my posts. Blogging software typically has a built-in form of tagging commonly know as categories, but categories pre-date true, modern tagging (aka, folksonomy). In addition, categories are very limited, not social and time consuming to create and manage. Hence my use of del.icio.us.

The account that I have created to manage my post tags on del.icio.us is called ZoingerPosts. When del.icio.us was first launched, it was total “flat” — that is, it listed all tags together in alphabetical order or by frequency. However, as del.icio.us’ service matured, they have added ways for users to create a form of hierarchy through a feature called tagged bundles. I wrote a post on tagged bundles a while back which explained how to create them — which with everything on del.icio.us is not exactly obvious (this is part of del.icio.us’ charm!).

When you browse to my ZoingerPosts account, the page displays on the left hand side a chronological list of my posts. This is useful, but not nearly as useful as the right hand side. On the right side, a list of all the tags I have created is grouped first by the tagged bundles (and their associated tags) and then by a list of the remaining tags (that is, those tags not included in a tagged bundle). Here’s a partial screen shot of the right hand side.

Overall, I’m finding this to be a really handy tool to sort through my list of archived posts. For example, to find the post that I had written on tagged bundles, all I had to do was do a find on the ZoingerPosts page for the word tagged (i.e., cntrl + F followed by tagged in Firefox). This changed the focus of my browser to the tag tagged.bundles in the list of tags. Clicking on the tagged.bundles tag opened up this page listing my post on del.icio.us’ tagged bundles feature.

Recently, I’ve noticed that Del.icio.us has been getting slower and slower. I read somewhere (I can’t remember where) that Del.icio.us’ user base has been growing like weeds over the past few months. To meet this new demand, Del.icio.us has been installing a bunch of new hardware. However, it seems that this new hardware is not enough to keep the service snappy.

Speed on the internet is life. Why do you think Google is so popular? Del.icio.us better get a handle on this problem — and fast (bad pun semi not intended).

As they say at Yahoo!,
You
Always
Have
Other
Options.

I was having some trouble over on the ZoingerPosts del.icio.us site (home of the tagged Zoinger post archive… which I am going to write about soon). The trouble was with one of my tagged bundles that I couldn’t seem to edit or delete. I was getting bummed out, because I had spent a lot of time tagging all of my posts for this account. The undeletable tagged bundle was really messing up the UI that I wanted for the site.

Kind of in desperation, I wrote to Joshua the founder of Del.icio.us. I figured that this would be like any normal company’s “customer service” where you get a message back from some automatron or something… never really getting any kind of “service” at all. However, just a couple days later I received a message back from Joshua saying that he would look at it.

And to my surprise, only a couple of days after that, I was finally able to delete that annoying tagged bundle. Yahoo!