Simpy Chichimichi

Reading about the Cognitive Analysis of Tagging reminded me of some interesting uses of tags that I've observed on Simpy. Here are three users who make interesting and very different use of tag support in Simpy:

User lrhale uses week days (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) for his/her tags almost exclusively. I wonder why he/she does that, and I wonder how this user makes use of links organized by day of the week. Perhaps he/she has certain days designated for checking up on a certain set of sites/links? I don't know. Interestingly, Saturday and Saturday tags are less frequently used than other week days. Does that imply less activity during those days for this user? Again, I don't know. Regardless, this use of tags makes for a very nice and tight tag cloud. Lesson 1: if you want pretty tag clouds, use a small set of distinct tags.

For the second example of tag use I'll use myself. As you can see from my tags, I have a much larger set of tags than lrhale, as I use them mostly to improve recall (read: searching, findability) of links later on. I described this tag use case a while back in Categories vs. Keywords vs. Labels vs. Tags entry. Because of my large ever-expanding tag set, my tag cloud is rather large. Lesson 2: if you use search as the means of finding and navigating information, and want to increase your chances of finding links, use tags more as descriptive keywords, and less as grouping labels.

For the last example I'll use Jarkko, who uses the most elaborate tagging scheme I have ever seen on any, tagging site out there. If you thought my tag cloud was large, look at Jarkko's tag cloud. It's huuuge! But look closely at that tag cloud, and you'll spot some interesting uses of tags. The following three patterns caught my attention:

1. @LANG:fi, @LANG:fr, @LANG:se, etc. qre used to denote content in Finish, French, Swedish, etc.
2. @site: ... pattern is used to denote a site/domain
3. $site: ... $ pattern is used to denote a site/domain

I don't know what the distinction between Jarkko's last two tagging patterns is, but I am wondering whether other Simpy users have the need for "show me all links I tagged in domain X" or "show me all links I tagged for host name Y". Do you?

If you spot other interesting tag usage patterns and want to share them, let me know, and I may include them in this entry.

Rashmi Sinha posted an interesting entry titled A cognitive analysis of tagging. I think readers of this blog may find it interesting. This reminds me of the Categories vs. Keywords vs. Labels vs. Tags post.