Delicious redesign launches, but I still hate tagging

At long last, we have a new Delicious.  Faster, more accessible, and better designed, the redesigned and renamed social bookmarking champion is no longer a vision of the future but an establishment of the present.  I’m not going to cover the launch here– if you’d like to read more, check out ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch’s excellent coverage– but rather, address an issue that’s remained relatively unchanged with the 2.0 iteration: tagging.

Tagging is a cornerstone of Delicious…

It’s safe to say that the tagging plays a large role in the Delicious framework.  As one of the main navigation tabs besides “Bookmarks” and “People,” it’s clear the Delicious designers expect tagging to be well-utilized and well-loved.

When tags were released in early 2007, Mashable wondered if users would bother filling in tags.  It seems they have, even if they do so grudgingly; Delicious features thousands upon thousands of dutifully-entered tags.

How do the folks at Delicious define a tag?  They say:

“A tag is simply a word you can use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the Web.”

… but it’s not as easy at it sounds

The problem is, nobody agrees on a way to tag.  I’ve complained about this before in regards to photo-sharing site Flickr, and the issue is just as pressing with bookmarks as it is with photos.  If tagging were solely a private experience, it wouldn’t be as pressing of an issue, but the fact that Delicious encourages public, social tagging means there’s trouble when ‘tagworlds’ collide.

Here are my three main guffs with tagging:

1. There’s a lack of a clear standard.  If I’m bookmarking an article about tagging, should I tag it as “tags” or “tagging?”  Or both?  If the word “tag” is in the title, should I omit it altogether?  Writers have been concerned about this problem for quite some time now and still no solution has been reached.
2. Semantic differences create unnecessary distinctions.  If I tag one story with the word “bookmark” and another with the tag “bookmarks,” these two tags get filed away under separate headers when they really indicate the same content.  Why should an accidental pluralization complicate the system?  Am I really expected to go back and check to make sure all current tags mesh with previous ones?
3. Tagging is time-consuming.  If I’ve just spent a good deal of time reading an article, interacting on a webpage, or engaging in a discussion, the last thing I want to do is take the time to tag a site.  Bookmarking should be fire and forget; rather, it’s a time-consuming endeavor if you want to do things properly.

How do you solve the tagging dilemma?  Is keeping things organized via semantic tagging worth your time, or do you find it more of a hassle than its worth?  Looking back, I find that tagging within Delicious has actually kept me from being more active on the site, just because I can’t stand the organization style.

I guess that’s why, for guys like us, categories exist.

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Tagged as: delicious, semantics, standards, tagging, time