Proper nouns ≠ Tags
Words of warning. The following post is hotly contested internally among us CoPress folk. Very likely this is controversial to the greater community as well. But at the risk of having people with pitchforks or angry twitterers show up at my door, I’ll go ahead and share my opinion.
I’d like to propose a simple rule:
Tags should never contain a proper noun.
This is a maxim is intended to avoid frustration from both users and content creators by implementing tags in a useful way.
Tags are the darling child of the social networking, web 2.0 community. The concept is simple really: words or short phrases that, as metadata, can be attached to anything on the web to enable easier searching, better SEO, and greater user ease of use. But, when misused they become overwhelming, hard to use and irrelevant.
Here’s the logic behind the rule to never put a proper noun in a tag: the term you’re entering is likely already in the article and therefore searchable. If it’s already there, then putting it into the tags is not only a repeated, wasted effort, but it is going to confuse the reader by culttering up the tag cloud.
- Wasted effort. If you’ve already put the proper noun in the article than the information is already there. Likewise for photos, the information should already be in the caption. Why would you spend the extra time trying to get the information in two places?
- You’re giving the reader too much info to sort through. A ton of information is good for computers, but if you want tags to be user-friendly (often the argument for putting proper nouns into the tag cloud), you need to limit what you choose to use.
- The whole post is already searchable. If you’ve got the person’s name or the place in the article, caption, description, whatever it is you’re writing, the data is searchable. Tags are there to add additional information that you couldn’t writing directly into the post.
- There’s no way you’re going to be able to remember every single proper noun that could possibly be affected. Let the semantic web (when it finally comes about) take care of that for you.
What should be tagged
Tags are meant to be used for conceptual information that you would never write in the post, but you’d like to attach to your data.
For example: If you take a picture of three friends at Disneyland, you don’t need to tag it, “Larry, Moe, Curly, Disneyland, Mickey Mouse, Magic Kingdom.” Instead tag it, “Outside, Group Picture, Portrait, Silly.”
The former list you’d easily put into a half decent caption. The latter would likely never actually be written anywhere else.
Try building a tag library that contains names and places is nearly impossible. How can you ever possibly account for everyone/thing that you could ever need? Stick to concepts and generalizations.
It’s a good rule
There are, of course, exceptions. If a proper noun becomes a concept onto itself, then it likely belongs in you tagging scheme. For example, during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, people were tagging their tweets on Twitter with #mumbai. Yes, a city name is a proper noun, but as a concept, #mumbai was the best common way to describe what was going on.
SImilarly, if you’re writing a article about social networking, then “Twitter,” is a good tag to include. As the service has become so popular that it has a host of meta-information out there.
Let me boil the rule down for you Twitter users. When you go to tag your next blog post, photo, video, github project, or any other piece of data online, ask yourself: “Would this tag make a good #hashtag on a post?”
CORRECTION: This post initially used the term “pronoun” instead of “proper noun,” as intended. All references in the headline, text and URL have since been corrected.