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

[cimorene]

I agree completely! Alas, my example was NOT hyperbolic - well, it was, but only because I added the "dick" and maybe some extra length, but I really saw a story tagged neverwhere:[richard.mayhew/marquis.de.carabas] or something very much like it today. I have encountered more than one bookmarker who combines fandom and pairing tags using all of those punctuation marks.

I try to look around, find the most popular pairing name, and use it, unless it's just too stupid to live. I actually renamed my tag from "quinto/pine" to "chris/zach" when the Way the Wind was Blowing changed on that one about a month after I started reading.

I do not know of any location for discussion of social bookmarking at all. I think discussing them specifically in a fandom context is more worthwhile, for us, since we have special concerns and needs - not that I know of a place where that's going on either, but I think there SHOULD be one.

[walkingshadow]

oh god, of course it was real, of course. that's the kind of thing i find even more inexplicable than needless leading punctuation, since the flat hierarchy is one of the best things about delicious.

there should absolutely be a place for the discussion of fannish social bookmarking! we could figure out how to tag authors who have gone through multiple name changes and come up with pithy tags for our favorite fannish tropes (huddling-together-for-warmth!fic? awkward!) and spawn flamewars about who has the right to be determining these things anyway, you can't tell me what to do! really though, i just want to complete like a thousand hours of anthropological research on like, pairing naming conventions and the voluntary norming process.

[cimorene]

I don't tag for author, although I can see that that can be useful. It brings up another can of worms about how to standardize, though. For instance, by the author's pseud, or by their lj name? MMWD always labels by lj name, and many times this is not the name the author goes by, but it's a quick way (when posting recs on lj as she does) to link to more info about the author, at least. I link to story versions off-lj whenever possible, because I hate reading there, and it only makes sense to me to use the author's actual pseud, which makes it more likely that you can find them at other sites or via Google (something I've had to do many times after I found someone whose work I liked. I'm dying for AO3 to go public and hopefully put an end to some of that).