Tag Archives: tags

1,000 Books

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LibraryThing is an online database (for books) that launched in August 2005. I started using it a month later and in the ensuing 19 years have cataloged 1,000 books. I always have a book close at hand but I am not a fast reader. I love to read and do so for a couple of hours every day. Perhaps my favorite pastime. And I can’t think of anything that would tell you more about who I am and what I’m interested in than the books I have read.

Fiction gets most of my reading time (692 titles) but in recent years I have developed a taste for nonfiction (245 titles). Together, the work of 351 authors. Most popular:

Robert B. Parker (51), John Sandford (46), Michael Connelly (36), Lawrence Block (32), Elmore Leonard (28), Sue Grafton (23), John D. Macdonald (23), Ross Thomas (21), Robert Crais (19), Mick Herron (17), Bill Granger (15), John Grisham (15), William Gibson (14), Carl Hiaasen (14), Neal Stephenson (13), elson DeMille (12)

I give each entry in the database one or more tags and that probably provides the clearest picture of my interests. (Note: tagging is more art than science)

I purchase most of the books I read because I love highlighting passages which was one of the main reasons I started a blog in 2002. When I finish a book I transcribe the highlighted passages as well as creating a blog post. Think of these as really short Cliffs Notes. Lots of examples here.

I only keep a book if I think there is chance I’ll read it again (I’ve read each of the John Sanford Prey novels half a dozen times). All others are donated to the local library for their annual book sale.

I couldn’t guess how much I’ve spent on books in the last fifty years. I’m sure Amazon has that number for the last 30 years, but I don’t regret a penny. Fiction is my virtual reality and non-fiction the better part of my education. With a book close at hand I am never bored.

Lots of my acquaintances prefer audio books and I’ll confess to some bias on this topic. Having someone read a book to me is not the same as reading the book. Might be a better experience for some but it’s not the same as hearing my mental voice tell the story. I love the smell of a book…the feel of the turning pages…the physical experience of reading.

Flickr Batch Organizer

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Flickr launched in February, 2004. I created an account and started uploading photos in March, 2005. So I guess I’m a long-time user. My primary photo repository is the Photos app on my MacBook (mirrored in my iCloud account): 2,449 photos. I make some effort to only save “keepers.” Flickr is where I post photos I’d like to share with the world. All under Creative Commons license for unrestricted use. I have about 2,500 photos in my photostream organized into albums and collections.

This 12 minute video (I know, too long) is a very cursory explanation of how I use Flickr’s Batch Organizer to manage photos.

Twenty years of blogging

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Twenty years ago (February 2, 2002) I posted my first entry here at smays.com. 5,981 posts. About 25 posts a month, 299 posts a year. My original tag line was, “I really have to start writing some of this down.” I’d hear or read a memorable quote and wanted a place to put it where I could find it later. A place where I could add some context to a photo or video clip, although video was really hard to do in those days. Took forever to encode and even longer to upload. I made the clips tiny to keep the file size small. The media archive contains 2,982 images; 191 video clips (with lots of links to YouTube); and 86 audio files.

From the beginning I’ve been diligent about categories (30) and tags (228). Metadata. Only found half a dozen I missed, now fixed. A few of my categories: Books (438), Family/Friends (583), Gadgets/apps (492), Internet (796), Media/Entertainment (1,185), Politics/gov (552), Sci/Tech (613), Miscellany (689), Video. You can see the full list in the sidebar.

For me tags are the most important part of a blog spanning two decades. Can’t imagine finding anything without them. A few examples: Blogging (346), Consciousness (102), Dogs (152), Google (230), Music (209), Television (157). With almost 6,000 posts, you don’t know what to search for if you don’t know it’s there. Tagging addresses that.

Many people will highlight portions of text or make margin notes while reading a book. But how would you ever find that bit later? Flip thorough all the pages? And that require you remember the quote you’re looking for. When I finish a a book (usually this is with non-fiction) I transcribe anything I underlined, and turn that into a blog post. WordPress does such a good job indexing posts I can search for some obscure word or phrase –even if I don’t remember the title of the book– and I’ve got it.

When I was working with clients (15 years ago?), helping them set up a blog and make their first post, one of two things would happen: There would be a dozen posts within 24 hours (very rare); or they wouldn’t post again for weeks. They wanted to have a blog, just just didn’t want to write blog posts. I believe there is blogging gene. You have it or you don’t.

Another pitfall I’ve mostly avoided is the need to make every post a brilliant essay. They do this because they expect people to read their blog and they want every post to be a work of art. I knew from the beginning it was unlikely anyone would read my blog. Not with any regularity. This was liberating. If I found something interesting (to me) in the New York Times, for example, I could copy a couple of grafs and paste to my blog with a link back to the original NYT story and done.

Social media platforms have pretty much killed off blogs. Nobody expects much effort for those posts. (They even have a name for them: “shitposts“) And in ten minutes every post is washed away in the stream. And those LIKES make you think someone is reading what you posted.

I was hooked on blogging from the beginning and believed it was/would be an important part of the Internet. I was wrong about that but that’s okay. From time to time I think about what will become of smays.com when I’m gone. Is there any way to keep it live, just as an archive of course? Probably not. The WayBack Machine (Internet Archive) has some of it. And that’s good enough.

One big room for everything

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Imagine a big room in your house where you keep the stuff you want to find later. Things you had written; articles from magazines; newspaper clippings; excerpts from books; cassette tapes of recorded music; VHS video cassettes… everything.

To save something you simply opened the door and tossed it into the room. Yes, in time my stuff would accumulate in piles waist high. But I know where everything is. It’s in this room.

To what extent does any such saved item really exist if I can’t find it?

Now imagine said room lined with filing cabinets, each clearly labeled as to contents. In each drawer there are section dividers and folders within. A 3-ring binder hanging on the wall for quick reference to what is in each of the filing cabinets (or banker boxes).

This has been my thinking as my blog has grown to 6,000+ posts in the last twenty years. I’ve been pretty disciplined about putting each post in one or more categories, and tagging for the finer grain. Without that metadata, my blog would be almost useless.

BUT WAIT! you say. You can also search the blogs db? You can, if you can remember what to search for.

PS: Sadly, I can’t think of an appropriate category or tag for this post… so I put it in STUFF.

Tags and Categories

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A little history. I was keeping notes in a journal long before I got my first computer (1984). When I came across a good quote in a book or a line in a movie, I’d jot it down in a spiral bound notebook with the idea I could find it later. Only way to do that, however, was to page through all of the notebooks. When I got my first computer I tried making notes in a text file which was searchable but just barely.

In the late 90’s I used Microsoft FrontPage to create a “personal home page” where I parked some of this stuff. (My tagline was: “I’ve really got to start writing some of this down”) Hardly an improvement over my notebooks but I was naive enough to think someone might want to read what I wrote. I put the new stuff at the top of the page and pushed the older notes down.

As blogging software and platforms came along, I tried most of them. Radio Userland, Blogger, TypePad, Posterous and — eventually — WordPress. I don’t recall when I first encountered the concept of tagging my posts but it wasn’t until I started using WordPress that I got serious about metadata. Why I tag and how I tag in a moment, first let’s talk about categories. Continue reading →

Tagging

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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.

Tag cloud

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We (yes, there IS a mouse in my pocket) migrated one of our websites over to WordPress this week. As near as we can determine, more than 46,000 stories were imported. My role in this has been modest but I did spend a good bit of time working with the categories, keywords, tags and other meta data used to organize all of those news and sports stories.

There are less than 5,000 posts to this blog but it would be impossible (okay, very difficult) to find anything without a good tagging scheme. One of the more common approaches to displaying those tags is the “tag cloud.” I have one on the right side of this page, near the bottom. And here’s the tag cloud for my flickr account.

tag-cloud-flickr

My friend Scott doesn’t like how tag clouds use different size text to indicate the most and least common topics. He thinks it looks “sloppy.” I find the visual cue very intuitive and easy to use. (I can see I have some clean-up to do)

Strangely, tagging is a bit like curling your tongue. Some people can do it and some just can’t. I’m getting better at it.

Ten Tips for New Bloggers

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There is no shortage of tips, guidelines and suggestions for how to blog and I am under no illusion that I can add anything fresh or original… but I am advising clients and co-workers on this subject so I thought I should take a stab at coming up with a few tips for new bloggers. Certainly not comprehensive, just the ones that popped into my head 15 minutes ago.

1. Headlines: Descriptive vs. clever – When I try to write a clever headline it just comes across as cryptic. A reader is much more likely to read your post if they have some idea what it’s about. Don’t delude yourself that they’ll be so intrigued by our clever headline that they’ll read what you’ve written. An example from smays.com: “More news after this.” vs. “30 years of broadcasting.”

2. Do not delete posts – There will come a time when you post something to your blog and later wish you hadn’t. It’s tempting to just delete the post. Don’t. The fact is you did write it and you did post it. Deleting it doesn’t change that and it’s almost surely cached somewhere. Pulling it is dishonest or unethical. A better approach is to do a follow-up post and say that you were wrong…or hasty…or misinformed. Or you just changed your mind about what you wrote. All okay. Deleting posts is considered very bad form and you’ll catch a lot of grief for doing it.

3. Editing posts – Sometimes you get something so wrong that you don’t want to leave it “out there,” uncorrected. The generally accepted way to handle this is to use a strike-through.

Example: “The senator owed $500,000 $200,000 in back taxes.”

You’ve corrected something that was inaccurate but you did so openly, letting readers see what you changed in your post.

4. Attribution – It’s common practice among bloggers to grab text from another blog or website and include it a post on their blog. Better bloggers take the time to rewrite. And there’s no reason not to put the original material in quotation marks or italics. At the very least, you should link back to the original story or blog post and attribute your source. And if you see an interesting post on someone’s blog and write about it on your blog… it’s considered good form to acknowledge this in your post…frequently at the end [via smays.com]

5. Use category tags – Tagging your posts with one or more categories makes it easy for a reader to see all of your posts on a particular subject. But don’t get carried away.

6. Link freely – Unless you’re a brilliant and original writer, much of the value in your blog posts will be links to other blogs and websites. Most blogging applications feature “permalinks,” which make it easy to permanently link to a specific blog post (as opposed to linking to the “home page” of the blog).

7. Photos – Given that a blog is just another type of web page, the same guidelines for photos apply. Only use an image when it adds something to the post. Keep it relevant. And, whenever possisble, be consistent with the size and placement of your images.

8. Comments – Most serious bloggers will argue that a blog without comments is not really the “conversation” that bloggers are always writing and talking about. But you’ll find many blogs where comments have been turned off. You can also set your comments so that you’re emailed when a reader has posted a comment so you can approve (or delete). “Comment spam” has become a real headache for many bloggers but the software is getting better at dealing with this issue. The best blogs get lots of comments and they add much to the overall experience.

9. Stay focused – Decide what your blog is about (if it’s about anything) and try to focus your posts in that direction. If you really don’t care who reads your blog or what they think about what you’ve written, then post about anything. But a blog that’s about everything is really about nothing. Try to find a subject that you know and/or care about and write about that. It can be anything (technology, your cat, recipes, politics) but find your niche.

10. Post frequently – The best, most dedicated bloggers post several times a day. Having something fresh every day goes a long way toward bringing people back to your blog. At the very least, try to post a few times a week. If you can’t find the time or the will to do that…ask yourself if you really want to mess with blogging at all.