Go away Tags

Posted on Thursday, November 15, 2007

Tags are a waste of time and I wish they would go away. Let's say I am scanning my bills to PDF's. When I am finished scanning them, I give them a tag or two and save them off. A year from now for some reason, I need to get all of my electric bills. This becomes a major PITA because some documents are tagged as "electric", some "company-name electric", some "power", whatever. Now it's a big cluster and my intent to organize made it worse.

When I used to save emails (gmail), I would always label them. After a short time I had a huge list of useless labels all over the place. I deleted all of my labels and now have a ton of email archived with 0 labels. I absolutely love it and would never go back. I can find anything a lot faster than looking through labels and don't have to worry about screwing up my organization.

As you will notice above, my blog is in one category "blog". If you want to find an old post, search for it. It takes less time than looking through a tag list.

Jayme

Comments

• Rich Mecer on 11.15.2007 at 3:20 AM

• I use tags on other peoples blogs. A good example is on ScuttGu's blog. I wanted to learn more about LINQ so I was browsing all the posts in the LINQ category, but those posts could also have been in the .net category if I wanted to read about .net. If it wasn't for tags, things like that would be pretty hard.

  I am using just one category on my blog now I'm on Graffiti, but I will still be tagging posts as I think it's a great way of grouping. One thing I do agree on, is it should be the *only* way of finding content. Tags are flakey at best, but do server a purpose.

  Just my 2 cents. ;)

• Anonymous on 11.15.2007 at 10:27 AM

• l2tag

• Kevin U on 11.15.2007 at 2:40 PM

• True, tags = 'suck'.

  When I'm blogging about something that no tag fits perfectly under, I now have to decide whether I want to create a new tag or leave it un-tagged. If I decide on a new tag, I feel obligated to post again under that tag. Right now I have about 5 tags that are only tied to one post. So I feel this pressure to add more content to those tags.

  -kevin

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