It’s been a while since I have used delicious.com for saving bookmarks. It has been a while for a number of reasons. First I worry about Yahoo!’s commitment to the product (or any product for that matter). Another was the departure of Leslie Orchard for Mozilla (I know, it’s been that long). Finally, and I can’t lie about this, I am a Google fan boy and had a lot of faith that Google was going to do something with it’s bookmark product (thanks for kicking a guy while he is down) but I have resolved myself to the fact that they won’t be doing anything with it and it too may go the way of another great service I used, Google Notebook.
In using delicious in the past, I always struggled with the problem of one word tags. I tried hyphens and camel case, but it seemed to be a work around that just detracted from the usability of the service.
Well, I went back to delicious and wiped out all the bookmarks, tags and tag bundles and decided to start from scratch. That is when I had an epiphany! I finally was able to see the beauty of single word tags.
Here is the beauty: Single word tags allow you to build the most flexible indexes.
Let me use the example of my weekend project which was learning more about HTML 5. I wanted to capture the links to good content about HTML 5, but I didn’t want it to get lost so I couldn’t find it later when I forgot the tag phrases I used. In addition, I wanted to be able to share the links I found with developers I know, but I didn’t want to spend a ton of time explaining the tags I used to get at the content.
Of course my first thought was to use delicious bundles. It turns out that a bundle is more of an inclusive was of bundling tags than an exclusive way. For instance if I wanted to create a bundle of all HTML5 tags and all Javascript tags no problem. If I wanted to create a bundle of only HTML5 tags that are links to Tutorials, bundles won’t work.
But you can do it by means of a bookmark filtering mechanism already built into delicious. Using the same scenario above; I can select the HTML5 tag and then the Tutorials tag and get only the bookmarks that are HTML5 Tutorials.
It is at this point that I realized tag phrases are a problem.
What if I wanted all HTML Tutorials? I would either have to tag my links HTML5 and HTML or, and I believe a better way, is to keep my tags to one word.
By breaking HTML5 into two tags, HTML and 5, I am able to allow a more natural language evolve. So now I could select all HTML links and add the tag 5 along with the tutorial tag to get all HTML5 tutorials, but I could leave out the 5 tag and get all HTML Tutorials. In addition, if someone else wanted to use the tags and start with Tutorial and drill down to HTML and 5, the process would still work.
This is a simple example, but hopefully you can see the power of one word tags.
