Tag! Your it! - Thing 13 (Tagging)

Yeah! I am halfway through the North Texas 23.

After reading this section on Tagging, I went back and inserted tags for all my blog posts, something I was remiss in doing when I wrote them. Tagging for me has been more of an afterthought.

It's interesting though. I've been reading BLOG BLAZERS: 40 TOP BLOGGERS SHARE THEIR SECRETS and, so far, not one of them has mentioned tagging as being important to blogging. They all emphazise the headline which indicates to me that they are thinking in terms of keyword searching rather than tagging. They are also thinking in terms of grabbing someone's attention. I think people are so used to keywords from searching on the internet.

I am not a cataloger so I don't have any emotional attachment to traditional LC and/or Sears subject headings. I've always thought the COOKERY subject heading was ineffectual. I say anything that helps the patrons find what they need is a good thing, but relevance is a big issue, too. I find Amazon very frustrating at times because I wonder how I got a hit on something that seems totally unrelated to what I am looking for.

One thing I wonder about tagging is if there are people out there that create tags just to bring people to their post. I am thinking, for example, a Neo-Nazi writing hate posts and then using taglines that might bring Jewish readers to it just to be hurtful to them. I'd like to think that wouldn't happen, but I'm not that much of an idealist. I suppose that would be one advantage to having a nonpartisan third party (i.e. a cataloger) assigning subject headings.