Since Gilby’s instituted thread tagging, we’ve seen many interesting phenomena appear in a little box labelled “Tags” at the bottom of each thread.
On a few occasions, I’ve seen people tag threads with words that might indicate the subject of the thread. I think this is the intended purpose: to summarize the thread in a word or two, so people can quickly search the fora for a subject of interest. Quite easy, that, as the tags themselves are “clickable”, leading you to instant results!
Tagging also gives one a way to look at the fora from a much higher level, to see what people are talking about here. Tags that show up in many places are bound to show up in the “tag cloud”, with increasing font size as the tag becomes more and more popular. (Are we really that obsessed with German sausages?)
Being that not all threads have been tagged with much more than the words in the title, I haven’t found thread tags as useful as I’d like. I’ve been able to achieve good results with the “Advanced Search” utility, so I haven’t seen much need to use another tool such as tag searching.
On other occasions, however, I’ve noticed people have been editorializing threads by putting their views in tags. As tags are limited to 25 characters, it’s quite tough to fully state one’s opinion. This channel is even more limited than a Facebook status or a Twitter update, which are criticized for their brevity. After all, if you’ve got something to say, you should be able to speak your mind without worrying about running out of words, no?
Another limitation of putting editorials into tags is that of anonymity. As it stands, we have no idea where tags come from! If we don’t know who you are, we can’t take you seriously. That is, if you aren’t going to stand behind your words, if you aren’t going to give them any personal value, why should we?
I thought I’d start this thread to open a discussion on tagging: have you used tags? How did it work for you? Have you wrote any tags? What made you decide to write the tags you did?
Also, if you’ve put any editorials into a thread anonymously, now’s your chance to stand up for your opinion. Do you really think Harper is against polls? Do you really believe Intotheblue is stupid? Do you really think Maestro8 should be banned? Tell us here! Tell us why! Tell us who you are!
…or if you wish to remain anonymous, fine, don’t tell us anything. Just know that your tags aren’t much more than graffiti. Hopefully Gilby will give us a little paint remover one of these days so we can clean up these ugly tags.
