If you love tags and if you use lots of them in del.icio.us, chances are good that you have to wait for 10 seconds or more until your pages are displayed in your browser. If you use del.icio.us on a regular basis this can become a royal PITA.

A little experiment: open the page of http://del.icio.us/notmuch (uses about 3000 tags) and then the page of http://del.icio.us/katiesays17 (uses about 130 tags) in a new tab or window (otherwise you might not come back.)

Your mileage may vary, but for me 100 tags seem to delay the rendering of the page for a second or two, and waiting for the page of notmuch is an exercise in patience.

Less tags equal a better browsing experience, so here are a few techniques (a.k.a. no brainers) you might consider for reducing the number of tags (if you’ve got lots of ’em) without deleting any informational value and without changing your basic tagging mode (you can conveniently rename tags under http://del.icio.us/settings/[yourusername]/tags):

get rid of typos

( Michael Arrington http://del.icio.us/marrington is the undisputed champ of creating variants on techcrunch: tecchrunch, techcruch, techcrunc, techcrund, techcrunhc, techrunch and tehcrunch.)

get rid of synonyms

Many del.icio.user apply web2.0 and web20 and web2 to a bookmark to cover each possible tag others might use for searching. Choose one and stick with it. Others will fill in the synonyms for you.

get rid of tags with only one attached resource

- if it’s not within your area of expertise or special interest – and use a broader term instead.

I’ve used 20 tags for describing various flavors of XML for 15 links I’ve bookmarked. As long as I won’t start heavy bookmarking in this field again, xml will just work fine.

Using these three simple filters I was able to tame down my tags from 750 to under 500, and del.icio.us just feels nice again.

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Comments:

(Michael Arrington is the undisputed champ of creating variants on techcrunch: tecchrunch, techcruch, techcrunc, techcrund, techcrunhc, techrunch and tehcrunch.)
Ahah, that’s hilarious.
Nice work on the tagging tips! I have trouble with the Synonyms myself. I’ve started to pay attention to that now though. :)
posted by Brian Benzinger : 11/26/2005 05:59:16 PM

thanks, Brian.
I’m actually no fan of howtos and guidelines on how people should tag, and synonyms do have their merits (I hope Michael isn’t homogenizing his). It’s just sth. to think about if your tag-count is exploding.
posted by Saurier : 11/27/2005 01:28:41 PM

Ah, but I like my 3000 tags – just wish there were tools other than one at a time to spruce them up.
I am finding the Mac app Cocoalicious very helpful in tag hygiene since it uses cached data and thus doesnt’ suffer from so much lag.
posted by Edward Vielmetti : 1/30/2006 11:11:27 PM