A number of so-called Web 2.0 sites use what are known as “tags” to allow mainly collaborative sites to classify or organise articles, although I prefer to have a ‘proper’ search mechanism in place and hardly every use tags on my own blogs, given they are generally categorised or classified into major subjects and have a search function anyway.

Nonetheless, my Movable Type blog and LiveJournal have this facility with words or phrases being allowable as tags.

Per Movable Type:

“Tagging is a popular method of classifying and organizing entries. Tags are simple, comma separated words or phrases that you attach to an item which describe particular facets of it. Tags provide extra metadata that can be used later to find a particular entry or other entries like it within the system. Tags are most effective when they are very specific. This specificity is gained through the use of tag combinations, which essentially form “tag intersections.” Tags can optionally be displayed on the published weblog where readers can click on them to find other entries that are similarly tagged.”

Per LiveJournal:

“Tags are words and short phrases used to organise your journal entries.”

So I can see how a decent tagging system using phrases might be useful. Guess what? Yes, Yuku has tags! Kudos to them ;)

Except there’s a catch. Didn’t you know there would be? Here’s an extract from the Yuku tags FAQ by Michelle:

“It is up to users to create meaningful tags though.”

I couldn’t agree more.

So, if a user was interested in the US TV Show “American Idol“, for instance, and wanted to tag their post accordingly, then that’s the tag they’d use, right?

Wrong! Michelle has looked at the Yuku implementation before stating categorically that:

“Tags are meant to be single word entities.”

Michelle, you missed the bit where you should have said:

“Our implementation only allows single word entities, unlike all the other sites using words or phrases.”

So you can use the terms ‘American’ and ‘Idol’ which won’t really aid a visitor or you can use a specially made up word of ‘AmericanIdol’. Let’s hope the users are seasoned Yuku veterans, eh?

Maybe Reg was too busy playing Wikipedia Edit Tag to code it properly…