Tips for Tidying Tags

When a story titled Confession: I'm a Car Slob popped up in the RSS feed I use to track who's linking to me, I figured that some recent passenger had decided to out me to the world. Turns out that Beth Kanter has identified the correlation between untidy cars and untidy tags: like me, she struggles with both.

As it happens, I recently undertook a reasonably successful tag cleanup after spending two years staring at a collection of seriously messed-up del.icio.us tags. I made the colossal mistake of comma-separating my tags when I first imported into the social bookmarks manager, and ever since, my tag cloud has included dozens of tags with commas next to them (for example, "e-democracy," as opposed to the correct "e-democracy"). Using the built-in del.icio.us tool for re-tagging was simply too painful, I concluded, since it required me to go through the tags one at a time, refreshing the tag edit interface for each one.

After researching alternative cleanup solutions, I finally hit upon Cocoalicious, a del.icio.us client for Macs. While I've never really gotten into using it as a daily bookmarking tool (I prefer to interact with del.icio.us from within my Firefox browser), Cocoalicious turns out to be a phenomenal solution for tidying up tags, once you set it up to sync with your del.icio.us account.

To do this, simply enter your del.icio.us account information into Cocoalicious; once the site has downloaded your bookmarks from del.icio.us, a list of all your tags appear in the left-hand pane of Cocoalicious' main window. Double-click a tag to edit it, just as you would edit a file name on your Mac desktop. If your new-and-improved tag happens to be the same as an existing tag, Cocoalicious converges the two. It took me all of half an hour to fix my disastrous tag collection once I hit upon this methodology.

Another tool that helped me with tag cleanup is del.icio.us' own tool for bundling related tags. You can access this on del.icio.us under settings>experimental>bundles or by going to http://del.icio.us/settings/yourusername/bundle. The tag bundling interface is very easy and quick to use and makes it much easier to see how your tag cloud adds up. My one complaint is that del.icio.us doesn't actually let you access the bookmarks collected in any one bundle: to see any of the bookmarks inside my "e-democracy" bundle, for example, I still have to click on one of the individual tags it contains (like "e-politics" or "e-research").

Kanter also recommends radically pruning one's Bloglines (a Web-based personal news aggregator) subscriptions as a solution to tag clutter. My own approach (which feels like a cheat) was to set up a personalized Google homepage with a much smaller collection of RSS subscriptions. My Google homepage contains the essential feeds that I want to keep on top of throughout the day:

• Top British Columbian, Canadian, and world news from several sources.
• The del.icio.us  tag "popular" (a nice window into what's hot online).
• The del.icio.us tag "for:awsamuel" so I can find out what other people want me to see (for an explanation of the "for:" tag, see tip 12 in Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging.)
• Technorati's feed for the "nptech" (nonprofit technology) tag.
• The del.icio.us' feed for the "nptech" tag.
• The NetSquared Blog feed.
• A so-called "ego feed" via PubSub that sends me any blog post or article that includes my name or the term "Social Signal."

Before I set up my personalized Google homepage, I was so overwhelmed by the mess of unread feeds on Bloglines that I dreaded visiting the site. Now I'm able to keep on top of the online news and items I really need to see — since my personalized Google homepage is my browser's default page, it loads many times a day — and use Bloglines when I want to find something to blog about, or have some time to catch up on a wider range of online stories.

As for tidying the car... well, unless Google radically expands its mandate, we'll have to work harder at sticking to our "clean it out during every fill-up" resolution. Though at the rate it is expanding its empire, I'd put my money on Google.