Why [], :, !, and . have no place in your delicious bookmarks

[cimorene]

I've just been looking for a story that I remembered seeing go by on my delicious network something like a few months ago.

Delicious has a search function that separates results from your own account, your network, and "Everybody". But I never found the result I was looking for, because the tags that included the keywords also included punctuation.

The punctuation ruins the tags, because a search term is everything in between two spaces on delicious. That means that if you tag your story with, for example,

!fandom:[neverwhere]:[marquis.de.carabas/richard."dick".mayhew]

it might look nice in your alphabetized list of tags, but only people who type "!fandom:[neverwhere]:[marquis.de.carabas/richard."dick".mayhew]" in the Search field will be able to find the entry.

Many entries that had tags like this, of one type or another, did come up in my search results, because I tried searching first one thing and then another ("neverwhere", "fandom:neverwhere", "marquis.de.carabas", etc), and several times I hit on a word that happened to show up in the subject line or description of an entry that had been tagged with punctuation which prevented it from showing up on the earlier searches. The fact that punctuation use is by no means standardized means that there's an almost infinitely greater number of search terms to try.

Of course, there are other ways to navigate delicious than search. I often choose a fandom name or pairing term that I think is bound to be used by at least somebody, find the Recent bookmarks, click on the one which has been saved by the most people, and then check its bookmarking history to see, in the sidebar, which tags are the most popular for that fandom.

There will inevitably be, for example, "ncis:la" as well as "ncisla", and "sam/g" as well as "g/sam", but there are also completely different pages for "pinto", "chris/zach", and "quinto/pine". There's a certain amount of overlap between them, but the smaller the fandom and the smaller the total number of bookmarks, the smaller that overlap is. And even in Due South, one of the biggest fandoms, the most popular Fraser/Kowalski stories under "duesouth" are not the same as the most popular Fraser/Kowalski stories under "fraser/kowalski".

So surfing from account to account has its limitations, and is time consuming. By going back and forth from account to account and tag to tag using the more popular stories, you can probably eventually find most variations of tags, but the search function would make that all a lot simpler - if the search terms were searchable.

Of course, some people's main concern with their delicious accounts is their own reference, and they have no desire whatsoever to share them with other people. In past discussions of the site, I have often seen comments from these people loudly and sometimes angrily declaring their unconcern in the comments. It's not a situation of "the fan doth protest too much", because I certainly believe them, but it is - literally - a situation where too much protesting is emanating from them. That is to say, their unconcern is a legitimate stance, but if they use delicious only as a personal tool, I have to wonder why they feel the need to read posts about the use of delicious as a social network, let alone participate in discussions of how it can best be used by the community as a whole. If this paragraph has not been clear enough, allow me to pre-emptively state that I have no interest in the completely separate logisitical concerns involved in using delicious non-socially. No doubt some of the unsearchable bookmarks were created by those people, and though they are an inconvenience to the rest of us, there is no reason why their owners should be expected to care about that, so they need not excuse themselves.

Comments

[torachan]

In the previous version of delicious, punctuation didn't matter. So if you clicked on sga it would also show things tagged !sga and .sga and whatever else. So some people were using punctuation to help organise their lists.

Then an update to delicious broke that. I think those people are probably either hoping delicious will eventually fix it so punctuation works the way it used to, or just don't want to change all their bookmarks.

[indeliblesasha]

It never occurred to me to consider delicious a social network. It's the place I keep my 1000+ bookmarks where I can easily cross-reference and sort them and don't risk losing them if my computer crashes.

It's unfortunate that they changed the search function, but I didn't even notice, which tells you how much I use it to begin with.

I'm wondering if you came to delicious more recently than I did? The options for using the site will have changed over time, so my expectations of the site would be different than someone who started using it much later.

[flamebyrd]

So did you find anything good in NCIS:LA? I just watched the first episode yesterday and am rather :D about how much the leads like each other. I hadn't realised that actual genuine affection (that isn't hidden behind denial and/or mean-spirited snark) between characters was missing from my life. (Or it could be that I just don't watch enough TV. I've never watched original!NCIS.)

I must admit I don't like punctuation in tags - I don't even like the author:name convention. Trying to use delicious as an intro to a new fandom (or to find recs for an old fandom you haven't read in a while - this happened to me just recently with Sentinel) is incredibly frustrating and quickly causes major tab explosion. (I also wish that more people included their personal reaction in the description box. You know, while I'm complaining.)

Actually, I think yours is one of my favourite del.icio.us lists because it matches what I'm looking for in a bookmark very nicely.

[walkingshadow]

plus there's the fact that tag bundling means you don't actually need punctuation to organize your tags anyway!

but the punctuation problem is part of the much larger issue of the normalization of tags and the normalization of all the conventions of social bookmarking in general. part of the reason the example you give is so broken (though i hope it was hyperbolic?) is not just because of all the punctuation, but because it is generally understood on delicious that one does not combine categories (e.g. fandom and pairing) in a single tag.

i find that pairing naming conventions are the most problematic and contain the most variation. because i AM interested in delicious as a social networking site, my personal policy is to check to see what the most people are doing. for example: merlin/arthur beats out arthur/merlin almost 2:1; and "sam/callen" is already way more popular than "sam/g" or "g/sam". and common sense helps! putting personal feelings about blends aside, searching on "pinto" will turn up bookmarks about beans and horses and cars and freida pinto in addition to gay porn. why introduce ambiguity?

the whole process is fascinating though, especially because most of it happens organically. is there any place in particular where current issues in social bookmarking is under discussion regularly?

[l_elfie]

i only use punctuation for common fandom conventions anyway, like girl!soandso, because i use delicious to find badfic porn and a lot of them are labeled that way. (i mean, i use delicious to find good porn and good not-porn, too, but the point stands.)

my personal least-favorite-thing is finding someone who seems to link to things i like... but who only tags about half of them completely. :( so even though they might have 15 AUs set in space, they've only tagged four of them with the "inspace!!" tag (or whatever) and i'm not gonna look through five hundred bookmarks for the rest. :( :( :(

Wordy wordy mcword!

[sherrold]

I post about delicious every so often (http://sherrold.dreamwidth.org/tag/delicious), mostly because we fascinate me, but also because we infuriate me.

For example, there's enormous variability in "the tag I use to mean I LOVED IT", though thankfully, most people are too lazy to tag stories they didn't like, so most tagging is at least a mild rec.

And "slash" is a terrible tag (who cares about that silly guitarist), but man, we own "firsttime" (sadly, we also own first-time, and it brings up different links.)

But yes, talk more on this -- you are not alone!

[silviakundera]

It didn't used to have this problem, I swear! But as I do more link clicking then full out word search I hadn't notice there were any changes...

Hmmm. It's kind of daunting to think of changing all my tags - I've got a zillion of them. But I suppose I should?

Just, what was actually really useful about framing each tag with [fandom:] and (pairing:) and {author:} etc was that:
a. I have so damn many tags
b. so when I start typing in a tag, it pulls up a suggestion very fast and efficiently if I can cut out a whole bunch of options -- so, for example, if I segregate pairings off in (pairing:), then when I start typing ( it already shows me a list of pairings to choose from...

What I really NEED it for are themes and word count, because honestly I don't remember what themes/wc segments I've set up or not, and I need to be able to pull up a list to check against. It's still really handy to pull up a list of fandoms, or a list of pairings, to make sure I don't create different names for the same thing (I used to do this, before switching to formatting), but less of a burden than the themes.

Maybe I can wipe some categories and leave [theme:] [words:] and {author:}, which people would search less?

What is really the best solution? It feels to me like neither is a good option for both the creator and the users -- zero formatting OR all with []/: formatting.