Today, I gave someone a ride in my car and I had to apologize for being a car slob. I have some good excuses - have young kids who eat in the car, I'm too crazy busy to clean it up, it has almost 100,000 miles, etc.
Well, I'm also a tagging and rss slob. I'm not going to put the link in to it - but tagging and rss encourages my sloppiness. I need to change my habits and be a little more neater and thoughtful.
- Only stuff you need to find later or think is really fantastic
- Try to clean up delicious tags for stuff like mispellings, etc. - perhaps this might need some regular maintenace
- Think about your categories and try to be consistent
- Do a radical weeding of you bloglines - unsubscribe from any that you don't find real value in reading anymore. Reorganize the folders in bloglines. Try to find meta feeds or teach yourself how to use the tools to splice together feeds. This is my next personal learning area ...
Here's an excellent article from Alexandra Samuels on tagging tips.
Good luck with that.. my tags are completely, 100%, undeniably out of control... lots of good stuff in those tags.. but no way to navigate them - I actually have found myself going BACK to Google to re-search for stuff I already know I've tagged (so sad, I know).
What seems fantastic to me one day, is boring or confusing the next!
Posted by: Marc Sirkin | May 24, 2006 at 12:49 PM
Marc: I think I might need a tag cleaning lady ... but I clean my own house and car .. sometimes.
Actually, I can navigate my tags in delicious - tag things with more than one tag. What I need to do is use some of the delicious search and replace tools to clean it up and perhaps trash some stuff.
In summary, I need to be more of an information curator than an information packrat.
Posted by: Beth | May 24, 2006 at 01:16 PM
Great observations!
The bottom line is tagging doesn't work. It will turn out to be just a phase and a fad that will last until everybody else has this aha! moment you just experienced. It takes way more time than anyone expects to organize your tags and keep them organized.
Dan Prives
http://www.wheremostneeded.org
Posted by: underalms | May 25, 2006 at 09:18 AM