SSWI — When in doubt, buff it out.
User Tagging: Some Results,
Written in Frisco, TX on June 9, 2006 and tagged with technology, site-spotlight and wp-hacks.
9 Comments, 0 Tweets, why not add one?
It has been roughly one month since I started my little end user tagging experiment, so let’s take a look at the results.
Mostly Harmless
Surprisingly, to me anyway, I have much less ‘tag spam’ than expected. I think I have blown away maybe 40 tags that were spammy (profanity, single letters and gibberish mostly). On the upside every post I have written since quietly going live has been tagged by end users.
My next step is to look at augmenting the built-in WordPress search with the tags that I am gathering. I might just write a replacement search for the site that uses tags and content indexing… who knows.
In case you were wondering
Yes, I am planning on releasing my customized version of UTW as soon as I can. My apologies to Chris Pirillo, things have been crazy yo.
Right now I am using a 3 tier classification structure for my content: categories, author tags and user submitted tags. After a year of collecting this could be very interesting.
If you post about this on Twitter, please use the hashtag #silly589.
Johan Svensson, on March 1, 2007
Chris J. Davis, on March 1, 2007
I go back and forth with cats. In one sense I can see how I really don't need them anymore, tagging is more than sufficient for structuring in my mind.
On the other hand, it doesn't really hurt anything for me to continue placing my posts in a few cats; in fact it gives my users one more entry or view into my content… and when pushed I think that is a good idea.
Chris Pirillo, on March 1, 2007
If you’re half as busy as I am, I totally understand.
Michael Heilemann, on March 1, 2007
How do you use the difference between your tags and our tags?
Liz Strauss, on March 1, 2007
I’m getting really interested in how this experiment is working.
Nick Barrett, on March 1, 2007
Can’t wait until this is released, wondering how it works already :)
Everyone says that catagories are usless but when you look deeper into them they can do almost everything UTW can plus more (not this though). I will be using them in my re-design to have 4 main catagories rather than tags. Of course I will keep tags because having a catagory cloud of 4 catagories itsn’t worth it…
Martin, on March 1, 2007
I’m really surprised that something end-user-controlled has not gone totally crazy. My user-self-control experiments nearly all failed. So i’m looking forward to your final results…
Orin Robertjon, on March 1, 2007
Wow! That sounds like a cool plugin. Something like this has been an idea in the past, but I couldn’t possibly begin to implement it. If you ever get the search part working, too, do share that. It’d be invaluable.
Michael Heilemann, on March 1, 2007
So… What’s happening with this? :)
I’ve done away with categories completely myself. They only remain to determine what type of entry that particular post is (ie, main entry, aside and/or “best of blog” entry).