Shall I Label that Tag?

Technology writers love to compare standards competitions to the famed Beta / VHS duel. Recently this nostalgiaparison was gucked onto the Blue Ray – Super Duper DVD battle. It could also be applied to the burgeoning divergence between the Widget and Gadget delivery systems. Will Google buy its way out of its unusual position of being the less accepted technology? Will staid platforms like Myspace learn that Javascript modules are the Least of their worries (far less damaging to user experience than the megabytes of ads)?

There is another high-exposure conflict in the tech world. In a limited view, it is a name game: Labels versus Tags. Both words are taken to mean “keywords”: any number of adjectives, nouns, verbs (y’know; the ‘Big Three’ of words) that are descriptive of an object, or symbolize analogous and related objects. At least, that is MY take on the purpose of a Tag aka Label. Although producers and consumers are increasingly encouraged to tag and label objects, most venues do not provide instructions. Indeed, for a prompt, usually a short example is all we get. This is what Google’s Blogger (yes, the very tool I’m using now) gives as a prompt:

“Labels for this post: (e.g. scooters, vacation, fall)”



Not much, eh? On the other extreme is Amazon.com, which gives a thorough education in Tagology. At the bottom of each product detail page is a heading “Tag this product” accompanied by the intuitive ‘What’s this?’ link, opening a pop-up page that includes an introductory paragraph followed by answers to “So how can I use tags?” and other questions. Since Amazon is heavily invested in tagging, it should place tags (and the ‘add a tag’ feature) atop the page, next to the image and product title.



When adding a tag at Amazon, the prompt itself is helpful. It reads: (“Separate multiple tags using commas”). There are 2 things important about that message:
1. It explicitly states how to separate multiple tags, compared to the Blogger prompt, which merely implies via an example.
2. The reality it conveys: commas as separator. Comma Separation of values works great for tags and labels (but not for all records of data—text that includes commas causes Quirks when separating with same. That’s why I’m a pipe delimiter).

Some tagging and label venues do not use the comma separator, but demand a Space between each tag. Ridiculous, isn’t it? The venue gives no explanation for this decision, nor any guidance for what to do with compound words. It is especially harmful, because tags are also used as a Search tool. And when searching, a consumer prefers to use plain English. Is the consumer expected to seek out “fishingRods?” I don’t know what these venues are thinking. Among them is the popular bookmark service “del.icio.us” If Delicious gets swallowed by Google Bookmarks, it will learn that “inferioirTechnology” can outdo a “headStart.”