Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

I remember a time in the not-so-distant past when we didn’t tag everything. The term “folksonomy” wasn’t even in our common vernacular. Those were some crazy days indeed.

Now that I’ve begun blogging a bit again and have, of course, implemented a tagging system, I’ve been thinking about the proper way to tag.

Basically, I want all my tags to be as consistent as possible. This will help to future-proof my folksonomy while also making navigation and content digging (no reference to Digg.com) much easier for both me and my lovely readers. What are the best tagging practices?

For example, if I’m writing a post on a book I’m currently reading, would I tag it “book” or “books?”

Since this post is in regards to just one book and I tag it as “book.” While this seems correct, when I then write a post on a book list, I’d like to add “books” to the tagging. I don’t, however, want both “book” and “books” in that post.

Ah, since I’m writing this as I go in free-flow, it’s getting rather confusing and I’m sure it’s horribly written.

The good news is, with most tagging systems now supporting synonyms, it helps with those redundancy problems. I’d still like to keep things as clean as possible for my own personal edification. When things in my blog database start to get messy I can’t sleep and wake up in cold sweats. It’s awful.