April 7, 2009

My Wordle

Wordle.net has been around for a while, and I finally decided to post what my personal Del.icio.us cloud would look like.

I have a pretty stable way of tagging items in my bookmark library. This is by no means totally complete, but it serves me well.

• Use only singular tense as a rule (“artist” rather than “artists”)
• Separate phrases into their roots (“interaction” and “design” rather than “interactiondesign”). This helps me generalize searches (just “design”) while also promoting tag intersections (“interaction” + “design”).
• Use generic modifiers (“research”, “tools” and “*”) for subdividing later through intersections.
• Refactor tags every few months. I’m only human and my tags get out of kilter after a while, which reduces the findability of the links. I try to stem tags and remove niche ones.
• Use action phrases like “toread” and “towatch” to cull out those things I need to take action on.

Of course, this system is tuned just for me. I don’t expect anyone else to benefit from this, even if the system might be fairly usable by other people. For more information on this, see my earlier post “Tagging is Selfish.”