Delicious tagging
by Adam Kuban
I’ve probably complained about this before, but I just don’t understand why Delicious doesn’t use a tagging protocol similar to Flickr‘s.
When I tag on Flickr, I can use multiple words and string them together as one tag using quotation marks, e.g., “New Madrid” will function as a single tag.
On Delicious, tags are “space delimited,” so as soon as you hit the space bar, even while using quotation marks, you’ve started a new tag. Thus, you have to tag such items as “newmadrid” or “NewMadrid.” As a copy editor, this drives me mad. It’s difficult to read a smushed-together all-lowercase tag, and the intercapped smushed-together tag just looks ridculous, particularly if you have three or more words forming your tag.
I assume that, because tags eventually wind up in URLs, Delicious doesn’t want spaces in there, which can sometimes be problematic. But Flickr has a solution for this; when it goes to render URLs from its tags, Flickr simply removes the spaces, lowercases the word(s), and smushes things together. But the tag displayed on-page remains nice and neat.
It only bothers me because Delicious just went through a redesign, and I was hoping they would address this. They have not. The only thing I found on the Delicious site regarding tag protocol was this unhelpful bit of advice:
What are tag descriptions?
Many people use the same word to tag, even when they may mean very different things. Tag Descriptions allow you to describe your tags for yourself and others visiting your bookmarks. To use Tag Descriptions, go to one of your tag pages there will be a link to “create tag description” at the top right, which leads to the interface for creating a Tag Description. Please note that Tag Descriptions are always public. To edit or delete your tag description, visit that tag page while logged in and you will see links to edit and delete.
If Delicious simply allowed me to tag like Flickr does, I would not need tag descriptions to remind myself or others what I meant by “newmadrid.”
Still, I use Delicious to build my daily(ish) link dumps via the Postalicious plug-in for WordPress. Maybe I should look at the other social-bookmarking services that Postalicious works with (ma.gnolia and Reddit).
