Monday, October 14, 2019
tagging and other discontents
In information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, database record, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system, although they may also be chosen from a controlled vocabulary.
— Wikipedia, Tag (metadata)
Tags are an idea that, as I fuzzily remember it, probably hit peak hype something well over a decade ago. There was a lot of stuff about "folk taxonomy" and tag clouds. I'm not sure if flickr was the first place I ran into tags, but it was a prominent idea there, in the era when flickr was still shiny and a new kind of thing and painfully hip.
I think I remember being disdainful of the hype, but on reflection I have a pretty long personal history with tagging. I was an early and enthusiastic user of Gmail, where labels (tags by another name) were a core abstraction. I added features to Brent Newhall's Wala, a wiki engine I maintained for a while, to treat links between pages as de facto tags.
By the time I quit using Gmail, I had accumulated quite a few labels: One each for most of the mailing lists or notifications I was subscribed to, automatically applied by filters. Dozens of others for various kinds of metadata: `bullshit`, `house`, `money`, `music`, `travel`, `weather`, `work`, `tickets`, etc. I used these something like traditional folders and something like an index into the giant pile of crap that is a decade's worth of e-mail.1
I haven't used WalaWiki for a while, because running a CGI script of its vintage started to seem risky, and then (in a different way) so did keeping a lot of my personal notes on the public web. Instead I've got around 1200 pages in a local vimwiki, and bookmark things on Pinboard, where as of this writing I've got something like 3100 tags.
Recent years have solidified a lot of my habits:
- I tag liberally
1 I still spell "e-mail" with a hyphen in it for the same reason I wear socks with sandals: It pisses people off.