Quick Question on Tagging

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Just a quickie, this: when you are assigning tags to a piece of online content, how do you prefer to segregate different items on the list:

  • with spaces – like del.icio.us
  • with commas – like WordPress
  • with spaces but with multi-word tags in speech marks, like Flickr?

Would be interesting to know people’s thoughts.

8 thoughts on “Quick Question on Tagging”

  1. I’m not bothered, maybe leaning a little towards the WP version.

    A bit of concistancy would be nice though, and would certainly help tagging become easier to understand for some people.

  2. Yeah, consistency is the thing. I like comma-separated too, but I guess it could mean tags becoming unwieldy and too long.

    The thing with the space-separated ones, like del.icio.us is that there is then no real convention for multi-word tags – do you just take the spaces out likethisforinstance or do as some people do and use +, – or _ between words. If people aren’t consistent then the whole point of the tags is lost.

  3. Commas. Spaces are a quasi-delimiter, not sufficiently distinct. Apostrophes and quote marks are functionally adequate, but commas are easier to use.

  4. I prefer commas. I don’t like having to make compound tags (e.g. dataportability, socialmedia) in del.ico.us. Commas involve less typing than the quotes marks + spaces approach.

  6. I think you know my views, given that I’ve spec’d the next phase development of the IDeA CoP platform to use comma delimitted tagging. Interesting to see other comments though.

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