Tagging: Ain't I Cute?

Kossacks delight in humor. Be it snark, parody, pun, satire, farce, or so many other forms, we can't seem to resist it.

I'm one of those who indulges, perhaps to excess, but there is one place where Daily Kos and I draw the line: cutesy tags.

Cutesy covers a lot of ground ("...say, you cover a lot of ground yourself: you'd better beat it, I hear they're going to tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing...")—in fact, it covers most of the forms of humor discussed above. And none of that ground should be in your tags: not that dread example in the tagging tips and FAQ explanation—"Hunterrific"—and not a tag like "Number Crunch A Go-Go", which is gone-gone as of yesterday. Why?

Yes, I've heard you exclaiming past the fold, over the flip, to grandmother's house and here to the body: what could possibly be wrong with "Number Crunch A Go-Go"—used for only one diary—especially when the diary it adorned was filled with tables containing the results from number crunching various electoral factors across the fifty states; it was published several months in advance of the 2006 elections.

Would you honestly ever do a tag search on "number crunch"? Would anyone? Really? I'd imagine the odds are about as good as searching on "Captain Crunch". No, not even that good. "Go-Go" isn't a good-good term at all, and forget about "A" unless you want all people tags with that middle initial jumbled with various diary series tags like "Ask A Kossak". What makes a tag useful is someone searching on that intuitive term or person, and finding diaries that fit.

What good do "Joementum", "Tweety", and "Falafel" do as tags? You're talking about Joe Lieberman, Chris Matthews, and Bill O'Reilly, just like "Bushco" or "Bush Regime" or "Bushies" all mean the Bush Administration. As terms of endearment in a diary, they're fun to read; as tags, they're obfuscatory. Let Lieberbunny hop through your prose, but keep him away from the tags.

If users really want to find instances of the Joementum Lieberbunny, that's what the regular Daily Kos Search is there for. Search—like Google—is designed to find specified words, catch phrases, or epithets. Tags are the index: you can find all the diaries about our President by entering the tag "George W. Bush" instead of having to search on Bush AND George NOT Laura NOT ("first President Bush" OR 41) OR Bushie OR Bushit OR Bushite OR BushLite... Even when the name "George W. Bush" doesn't actually appear in the diary text, the diary can be about him—you have a direct way to find such tagged diaries that a normal search simply doesn't offer. Go thou and tag well, and save your cuteness for the diary text and comments.

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Tag cleanup
We can always use assistance in standardizing tags, both in current diaries and in cleaning up old mistakes. If you're a Trusted User, please visit the Tag cleanup jobs page and start fixing tags. Thanks!

Tagging resources
All tagging diaries are viewable by using the tag tags. Also check the FAQ's Tag Guidelines. My most recent diary was Tagging: No Titles, Please—kos made a couple of comments in that one—while the one before it discussed Tagging Dos and Don'ts.

SarahLee's Welcome New Users (Tag Talk) 04/06/07 covers tagging in a more orderly, comprehensive manner. ek hornbeck's first diary on Tags, from the beginning of this year, is always worth a read (or review if you've already read it). Tagging continues to evolve; generally, if a later diary disagrees with an earlier one, the most recent diary is correct.

Not sure whether to use "Moqtada al Sadr" or "Muqtada al-Sadr"; "Chris Dodd" or "Christopher Dodd"? Try The Centerfielder's Search for existing Tags. You can search on any string you want—even a partial string—and also set a minimum and maximum number of diaries the resultant tags can be in. It's extremely useful if you're trying to determine the most popular tag for a subject, or even the likely spelling for a tag. One caveat: the tag list for this tool is refreshed once a day, so you won't see a tag you've added for the first time until the following morning. In the unlikely event that the tag search tool is down (such as earlier this week), it will simply return no tags for every query. Quick test: if you enter kos and it returns no tags, it's down, even though it doesn't display an error screen. For "kos", it should return "Ask A Kossak", "Daily Kos", "Kosovo", "Markos Moulitsas", "YearlyKos 2007", and several more tags used in at least 30 diaries each.

I'll be around to answer any tagging questions this evening, and other tag librarians will be stopping in, too. Floor's open! (Oh yeah: use "Muqtada al-Sadr" and "Chris Dodd".)