When I first encountered the concept of tagging, it seemed a little… obsessive? I’ve always been pretty good about organizing things into folders and the idea of “meta data” was mostly lost on me. In the last few years, however, I have become a believer. As good as search has become (on the desktop and in the cloud), there’s just too much stuff.

• smays.com – 4,707 posts
• flickr – 1,744 images
• iPhoto – 2, 670 images
• YouTube – 132 videos
• Posterous – 374 posts
• Twitter – 4,933 (no tags but you can star)

And that’s not much stuff compared to many others. Which brings me to mail. I use Apple Mail at work and here on the MacBook. Compared to Outlook, it’s very lean and basic. Has a notes and to-do feature (that I don’t use), but basically just does mail, with a spare, clean interface.

When it comes to email, there seems to be two schools of thought:

1. Save everything in one folder. Or, difficult as it is for me to believe, just leave everything in the in-box or the deleted folder. Our Help Desk guys tell me it’s not uncommon to find 20,000 emails in one of these folders. These are the keep-it-all-and-search folks.
2. Delete emails quickly or save in one of several folders. I fall into the latter group.

Where was I headed with all of this? Oh, tags.

I don’t have all that many emails but now that I have the tagging bug, I find myself wanting to tag my emails, so I’m trying out a little Apple Mail plug-in called MailTags. It’s not very pretty (which is unusual) but works pretty well. And it gives me the option of editing the subject line of an email. Don’t get me started on clueless subject lines.

If you’d like to know more about tagging, I recommend Everything is Miscellaneous, by Dr. David Weinberger.