I spent some time this weekend cleaning up my del.icio.us bookmarks. I have a decent, but not huge collection (616 links) and I find that every few months it’s a good thing to clean up duplicate tags (relax_ng vs relaxng), improve bundles and fix some misspelled tags. This time I also rearranged some of my tagging conventions. As most users, I add as many tags as makes sense for a certain link. I find the suggestions made by del.icio.us to be quite good and frequently choose among them.
Articles or blog posts I now tag with the author with the “by:” tag prefix, e.g. by:elliotte_rusty_harold. I find this a good way of keeping track of writing by my favorite authors.
I use the natively supported “for:” prefix to send links to friends who also use del.icio.us. I still got to gather some more experience on this but so far it looks good. I like to minimal approach del.icio.us takes to this type of functionality.
Links which are not HTML pages, especially PDFs, gets tagged with a “format:” prefix, e.g. format:pdf. This serves mostly as a hint/warning for myself while browsing my links. As linking to special formats like SVG might increase, this might be a good way of locating all of these at the same time.
Links which require some attention from me, gets a “to:” prefix. Currently, there are two of these, to:read and to:wish, but I expect further types in the future, e.g. to:blog for stuff I want to comment in my blog.
Since I spend a lot of time with different open source tools, lots of my links are for different OSS projects. As licenses are of great importance in this world, I’ve created a “license:” prefix, e.g. license:gpl. I haven’t really started using this yet (only one link) but I hope it will be useful.
As seen above, I use different prefixes for special types of tags. So far I find it a very good practice and I expect to define further prefixes as I go along. A de facto convention for these types of tags would be great. For example, if everyone would be using the by: prefix, finding all articles by an author, spread over different sites, would be very simple. Does anyone know of such a conventions that people use (it seems like some of the prefixes I use also get’s used by others, e.g. license:gpl)? I would certainly be happy to switch to whatever is the majority choice. If not, how would one establish such a convention in the best way?
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