Hi, I’ve just joined so maybe I’m commenting in the wrong section or this has been suggested elsewhere before.

I don’t know how it works for every site but for those with tagging systems similar to delicious, I think the idea of Inbox Zero works well for tagging too.

I say this because one of the things I hate about tagging (I’m a folders type of guy) is how I have to really think about every detail of an item prior to tagging and still, I might miss a tag or so or add an extra tag that I’ll find I don’t actually need when doing the actual search.

First would be to have an inbox. For those who imported bookmarks in delicious, the import tags works well in my opinion.

The idea is to go wild on tagging or what aleene from Microcontent Musings calls informal tagging and add an “inbox” tag at the end of those tags. In this example, I would add an import tag for every bookmark I submit to delicious even the ones that I didn’t import. As an added bonus, all the bookmarks that got imported into delicious and had received informal tags due to delicious’ autotagging or just from a previous mistake are also tagged with the import tag assuming the person didn’t remove it.

Then if a user wants the advantage and flexibility of informal tagging, they could just go to the import tag and work on the related tags there. Still the goal would be to not have anything under import as much as possible without having to worry about every little item that’s going to be tagged.

The next step would be to just follow the above guide through and through and then add another consistent tag say satisfactory and replace the inbox tag with it. Then, when the user needs formal tagging, he gets to have that option to. The downside being that the items aren’t probably going to be organized formally as soon as they’re added but I find I’m much more focused in adding tags when I’m in organize item mode rather than add tags to new item mode.