Tagging

I predict that as they are currently being utilized tags will quickly become completely useless. After only a week of operation, look at the current list of tags: http://www.annarbor.com/get_rss/. There are misspellings, case differences, and nonsensical words.

Some authors apparently don't even understand the concept of tagging because there are tags for "classic egg salad sandwich with photos" and "non-motorized transportation plan". Other authors are delimiting tags with semi-colons instead of commas, resulting in tags like "Kurt Wermers; Rich Rodriguez; Justin Boren;"

Perhaps the worst thing is the inconsistent application of tags. For example, look at the first post about the tragic death of a bicyclist on Tuesday. That post is tagged "bicyclist, crash, Pittsfield Township". Let's imagine that I came across that post and wondered if there were any follow-up posts. If I clicked on any of the 3 tags, I wouldn't see that there is a follow-up story because it is tagged with "bicycle, Pittsfield, Southeast Michigan Council of Governments".

Tagging is great for situations in which you have a large number of people tagging the same item, but it's not so great when you have a small number of people individually tagging separate items. If 10,000 people were to tag those two posts about the death of the cyclist, it's very likely that the same tags would be applied to both articles. If there are only 2 people each separately tagging 1 of the posts, it's very unlikely that the same tags would be applied to both articles. (And the fact that the author of both posts is actually the same person only highlights the difficulty of consistent tag application from a small set of taggers.)

I'm glad that you're cleaning up the tags. But why would you keep title words out of the tags? If you look for articles tagged "bicycle", wouldn't you expect to see articles about bicycles regardless of whether "bicycle" is in the title?

What "us guys" think is that we should be tagging your articles. That's how social media work.

Thanks for the title words explanation. I still think that you'll find this to be an unworkable solution. Vaguery is right that readers should be the ones tagging the articles. The whole point of tagging is to avoid the inconsistencies and headache of categorization of items by a small number of individuals. The current tagging scheme on the site has all of those inconsistencies and headaches but none of the rigor that makes something like a library catalog useful.

Jim: see, you're not a week old. You (and your managers) can't in good faith simultaneously claim to be 175 years old and at the same time absolutely ignorant of the social norms and technical details of this way-cool novel online internet environment you've launched into.

What we're trying to communicate to you is how to comport yourselves like adults who have been paying attention.

So, please: "tagging" is something that your readers should be allowed to do. If you want the authors or "editors" or whatever to manage it without allowing the community to do it properly, then the words should be called either "keywords" or "categories".

That's actually a matter of common usage.

Ed, we know that we can tag stories through 3rd parties. The point is not that I cannot tag stories directly on annarbor.com, but rather that the site has tags that aren't very tag-like and unless carefully organized will quickly become worse than useless. I don't really even want to tag annarbor.com stories. But I do want to find annarbor.com content quickly and easily.

Anyway, I'm glad that you're working on improving tagging and wish you luck with what I think will be a very difficult task.

As someone who is more of a "user" than a tech-geek, I don't even really understand tagging. Or how I access it on annarbor.com. So you might want to think about adding an explanation to how to use it.
I agree that having others tag is a good idea, if it works like tagging pictures in Facebook does.

Jim's explanation does not make it clear that as a user Ruth cannot tag content on annarbor.com. Ruth and all other users can only view tags that have already been applied by authors and editors (my terms, not sure what annarbor.com calls them).

Ruth, at the bottom of each article is a section with a list of tags (see image below). If you click on a link in that tag section, you'll get a page with other content that has been tagged with the same tag on which you clicked. (You've probably figured all of that out already, so this is mostly for anyone else who stumbles accross this discussion.)

Just to be clear, when I wrote above that "Ruth cannot tag content on annarbor.com", I meant that Ruth and other users cannot edit or add to the list of tags that are on the annarbor.com page (circled in red in my image above).

Users can tag articles using 3rd party tools like those listed in the Share This Post dropdown but doing so has no effect on what appears in the annarbor.com tag list.

First of all, thanks Jim for your offer but I'm comfortable with computers I'm just not a programmer.
Now that I understand what you mean by tagging, I would say the record right now is DISMAL. You (I don't mean you personally, but the staff) are clearly not in control of this right now. If you want to use tags as labels, then maybe you need a librarian or curator.
For instance:
Currently, the bicyclist death stories have tags of bicyclist, cyclist, bicycle; Pittsfield Township and Pittsfield Township Department of Public Safety.
The story about the house with the mold is tagged as Ypsilanti (which it is NOT)--it is Ypsilanti Township.
The story about the Angell Elementary area armed robbery doesn't get pulled into the Angell neighborhood feed, even though a tag or title with that heading should certainly pull into those.

Jim, Was this a typo? (I hope)

Again, thanks to everyone for expressing their concerns. We can build this community without you.

The New York Times has made its thesaurus for tagging available:

http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/tim...