Shaun R. Haber

Tonight I went through all my delicious bookmarks in an effort to normalize my tags.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for the last 5 months, and have since bookmarked many sites. I’ve been liberal with my tagging, perhaps too liberal, and ended up with a large tag cloud scattered with the noise of fragmented tags.

I had some reduntant tags like ‘reference’. Since all my del.icio.us bookmarks are sites I would refer to, there is no need have this as a tag. I also had a lot of obscure and unnecessary tags, basically keywords that were the names of random companies, applications, projects, etc.

All this was to be expected, however, since the tag cloud grows organically from the bottom-up and it takes time for common keywords to emerge. I knew all along I would need to throw out the noise and give myself a solid grounding of keywords. The result is an emergent tagging vocabulary.

This vocabulary of course is by no means static, and I expect it will evolve into a fragmented mess once again. I’ll check back in 5 months.

The snapshot is how my tag cloud looks as of now.