I'm sick and tired of tagging. TAG THIS, TAG THAT, TAG YOU'RE IT! FUCK YOU, 3rd grade PE is over.
I read a lot of online advertising and publishing newsletters, and all I ever hear about is the rise of tagging. There's already a million sites out there that use tags, and there's another equally annoying group of sites that are devoted SOLELY to tags (del.icio.us, Technorati). Apparently it's so important, even black people are leaving them on their hats.
Here's a snippet of the latest CafePress affiliate newsletter (they print your graphics on clothes and coffee mugs and bumper stickers and cereal bowls and tampons and whatever else you store in your closet):
Tools for Smart, Effective Tagging
On the Tag page, use the Tag recommendation to see what other Shopkeepers are using for related Tags. This will help you broaden Tags for your images. However, be sure to only use Tags that are most relevant for your image. More Tags doesn't necessarily mean better. Relevant Tags are really what counts.
Use the Marketplace Stats (on the bottom of the Tag page) to see how
often your Tags are searched for currently, and the day before. This is a good tool to see how often your Tags are searched on by potential customers. A tip : Test Tags one-at-a-time to view past searches for a specific Tag.Use the Bulk Tag tool to easily tag groups of related images. A tip: After using the Bulk Tag, go back to each image and add more relevant Tags to leverage that image. It's a little more work, but well worth the effort. Example: Bulk Tag all your “Dog” images then do some fine-tuning, for each image to specify “Photography”, “Rescue”, “Agility” or whatever is appropriate.
If that isn't enough to make you want to kill yourself, please, join my cult and I can subtly coax you into an involuntary death. Sometimes I don't even know WHY I hate tags. It could partially be one of those things where if you say a word over and over until it loses its meaning then you suddenly go into an existentialist frenzy over the concept of language. Like if I say “tomato” too many times I start to wonder how tomatoes grow, and then I wonder who named it that and why, and then I wonder whether I would eat more of them if they were called “lombados,” and then I think about the Lombardi trophy, but that's a proper noun so it's unfair to compare it to a lombado, which doesn't even exist yet because I just made it up, but theoretically it COULD have existed had somebody not been named Tom and wanted a red thing named after them, and so on until the word “tomato” loses all attachment to the fruit/vegetable it is. See, we can't even decide what it IS.
But mostly, it's this bandwagon thing that kills me. Because tags are occasionally useful, everyone suddenly thinks they'd be the best idea for EVERYTHING on the internet to be tagged. Well excuse me, but I would almost always prefer specific relevance to general batching. The internet is complicated and overwhelming enough as it is; just tell me where to go based on what I'm already doing. Sometimes I feel like the internet has become completely over-organized. And this is coming from someone who is OCD organizational. The more people try to create things to simplify everything you're already doing, the more stuff we end up “needing.” And the more I go back to the simplest route, like applications I was already using, or just plain Google.
So taggers, if you're listening, please stop labeling yourselves so much. We can't afford all this nonsense.