43 Folders

Back to Work

Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

Join us via RSS, iTunes, or at 5by5.tv.

”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Becoming a tagging kung-fu master

You’ve heard the hype about tagging. You’ve seen people flocking to sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, where they jump head-first into a pulsing mass of disjointed tags, possibly never to be heard from again. And you’ve wondered: how exactly is tagging worthwhile again?

Any idiot can tag, but you want tags that are useful rather than a disorganized mess. This is not an unreasonable desire, and by completing three simple steps before you start tagging, you too can become a tagging kung-fu master. (Or, if you want more intellectual cred, explicate your personal taxonomy.)

Whether you are tagging in a private, public, or collaborative system, consistency is the byword when tagging. Without a consistent pattern you won’t know what tags to assign items, what tags to search for to find items, or what items you’ll likely get while browsing your tags. The following three steps will help you create a consistent pattern to follow. Even if you’ve been tagging for a while, you may find these steps helpful to refine your knowledge of your own tagging habits and practices. (Please note, however, that these steps are focused on developing a personal tagging system; to optimize your tagging for collaborative use you would need to develop your system somewhat differently.)

Step 1: Know what

Are you tagging PDFs in Yep, notes in Notae, characters in Avenir, or photos in iPhoto ‘08? Whether you’re tagging in one program or several, you need to make a list of the general types of different items that you want to tag.

Tagging many different kinds of items does not make planning a tagging system much more complicated, but because you’ll tag different kinds of items differently you definitely need to think about what you’re going to tag.

Step 2: Know when

Part of knowing your target is knowing what kind of metadata is already available to you (through, say, Spotlight or the Finder) and not duplicating that metadata in your tags. For instance, every file in Mac OS X has a date created and date modified attached to it. As a result, tagging your files with a date is typically a silly idea. Tagging Word documents “word” is also redundant; the system knows which documents are Word documents and finding all of them is only a saved search away. Before you proceed to the third step, you need to make sure you know what information about your target you already have available. You don’t have to write it down if you don’t want to; just be aware.

Although there may be some situations in which you want to tag an item with every possible tag you can think of, most of the time you will want to keep your tags succinct and well-targeted, which means avoiding redundancy. Tags may be extremely flexible but they are the least efficient kind of metadata in some ways because they have no indication what they are marking. When you search the “date modified” field, you know exactly what you’re finding. An “05-31-2007” tag, on the other hand, could be any number of things.

Step 3: Pick your attributes

This is the heart of a consistent tagging system, and can be summed up in a single question: how do you think about the item you are tagging? For instance, when you are filing or searching for a photo, what do you think of? The location of the photo? The subject or people in the photo? The event taking place when you took the photo? Something else entirely?

Write out a list of the attributes that you think of when thinking of your target items. Ideally, you should make this a brainstormed list that includes every attribute you can possibly think of that you might want to tag. As you make the list for your different target items, star the attributes that spring immediately to mind.

Once you have a list, go through it to weed out the attributes that are covered by the item’s non-tag metadata. Then go through it again and pick out what attributes you want to use for tagging. Try to keep it a short, specific list focused on the attributes that sprang immediately to mind. You should also add attributes that didn’t spring immediately to mind, but that you want to make a habit of tagging anyway because they will be useful.

When you have this list of attributes, you are ready to tag. You should probably put your list of attributes somewhere visible, for example a Post-It by your computer or a virtual sticky note on-screen, at least until you’ve either memorized them or developed good tagging habits.

When you’re tagging, try to consistently attach a tag for every one of the attributes that you’ve selected. The more often you can hit all of them, the easier it will be for you to find files later. Additionally, knowing what attributes you are tagging makes coming up with specific tags much easier. Rather than sitting worrying over every photograph you can quickly attach a location, person, and event (or whatever attributes you decide on). Ideally, your attributes and tags should fit into the following sentence: “This [item]’s [attribute] is [tag].” For example, “this photo’s location is New York.”

The specific tags that you use will doubtless shift over time and circumstance, but the attributes that you are tagging should remain much more stable. By defining a standardized set of attributes for each kind of item that you are tagging and only deviating when necessary (or when the way you think about a given type of item begins to change), you will be able to create a consistent tagging system that helps you find items quickly because it matches the way you think.

And more importantly, you will have taken your first steps on the road to becoming a full tagging kung-fu master. Or developing a stream-lined personal taxonomy. Whichever works for you.

Nalusk's picture

Surprised there's no Inbox Zero-like implementation in this one.

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.

 
EXPLORE 43Folders THE GOOD STUFF

Popular
Today

Popular
Classics

An Oblique Strategy:
Honor thy error as a hidden intention


STAY IN THE LOOP:

Subscribe with Google Reader

Subscribe on Netvibes

Add to Technorati Favorites

Subscribe on Pageflakes

Add RSS feed

The Podcast Feed

Cranking

Merlin used to crank. He’s not cranking any more.

This is an essay about family, priorities, and Shakey’s Pizza, and it’s probably the best thing he’s written. »

Scared Shitless

Merlin’s scared. You’re scared. Everybody is scared.

This is the video of Merlin’s keynote at Webstock 2011. The one where he cried. You should watch it. »