So it's been almost a day since I started using Newsvine and I'd have to say overall, it's a bit addictive. It's like Flickr... but instead of me staring and searching for other people's personal pictures, I'm keeping current on my favorite news topics. It's quite a feeling.
I signed in last night, curious as to what I was about to enter into. I had read Mike's description on his blog and my intrest was accurately piqued. So when I got to the main page I was amazed at what I was seeing. It's a ton of content, almost too much. I lost about 3 hours last night playing around, checking things out and just seeing what was happening here. But then something struck me as awkward... I noticed the tagging system Newsvine uses. The "hyphen-between-words" approach.
I'm a user of del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, 43things... hell, even Amazon uses tags now... but I'd never seen the hyphen approach. It's irked me ever since. I'm usually tagging things left and right but the hyphen seems so unnatural. Personally, I prefer the Flickr way, using "quotations" to surround multiple words. It may be that I use Flickr the most when tagging but that seems like the way to go to me. I'm open to anything at this point as I've mixed the tagging systems up on each of these (and probably will with this article eve!)
Now I know I'm not the first to point to the standardization of tagging. But I'd like to see something a little more universal when it comes to tagging. It's been around for a while now. Tagging is fairly accepted as the way of cataloging the extreme amount of content now on the web. Maybe it's time to figure out how to use it in a way that can be helpful to everyone and bring it to more sites web-wide?
Of course, I could be completely missing the point of tagging. It's true, each site uses tags in different way. Technorati for public use, del.icio.us for personal use and Flickr for a little bit of both. Maybe that's why there's hasn't been a huge attempt to standardize tagging as it is now.
That's just my two pennies...
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