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cimoreneI'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,
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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 29 Oct 2009 01:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29 Oct 2009 08:28 pm (UTC)If I think I have a theme for stories where they break up and get back together (I do! it's a big kink with me! but honestly I don't remember what it is), then I start typing [theme: and it instantly drops me down a list of like 15 top tags that start with that - easy then to remember which one it was. To make it the lists smaller, I do things like section merlin themes into [theme-merlin:] so I quickly get to just the merlin-specific themes (I get really in the mood for certain kinds of stories in certain fandoms, so for example I like to tag merlin with "magic-discovery" and "exile" themes and supernatural with themes like "demonic!winchester")
Otherwise, maybe I guess... I did breakup? maybe if I'm right, it will come up. But what if it was brkupmakeup? Or something else? I will have to guess every possible combo, and who knows what made sense at the time? And then I'm constantly having to go maintain my tags and clean them up, and honestly that's an additional level of effort I'm not looking for and might not be ultimately sustainable (I know my weaknesses).
Or, like, fast and the furious - that's a real one that I accidentally made at least 3 fandom names for once-upon-a-time when before I went to categories. I have really really poor memory of stuff like that. I think at one time I had fntf and fast_furious and fastandthefurious and thefastandfurious, or something like that.
Easy fandom names like Merlin? I really don't need [fandom:merlin] as a cheat sheet. (unless I was foolhardy enough to title it merlinuk) But remembering if I use janeausten or austen or jausten or mansfieldpark for Mansfield Park fanfic? DIFFICULT FOR SILVIA. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 29 Oct 2009 11:19 pm (UTC)I didn't mean to imply that I don't have autocomplete. It does that for me, too. I don't have any trouble remembering any of my tags, is all - it only saves me the trouble of typing them. On the other hand, I use the ♥ button from the tag list often, since you can't type that - otherwise it has to be copypasted.
It's the tag bundles under the blue "Tags" tab there that I was talking about.
Also, if the problem is that you can't remember how you abbreviated a fandom name, you can probably discover this via autocomplete anyway. In the case of F&F, all you'd have to do is start typing "fast-" or "thefast-" and the like; one of them's bound to come up. In your theme examples, it's obviously different. But then, do theme, trope, and kink tags need to be universally searchable? I'm inclined to think not. When you're talking about searchability, I think the main concerns are fandom, author, and character/pairing names.
(no subject)
Date: 30 Oct 2009 12:38 am (UTC)Thanks! I will try to figure out if I can set this view up, and if I get it working I'll consider setting aside a large block of time to go back and change my bookmarking for fandom and pairing.
(no subject)
Date: 30 Oct 2009 01:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30 Oct 2009 09:27 pm (UTC)And I've looked all over for Delicious settings to change and I can't figure out what the deal is. Maybe the Delicious tool bar offers different things for different browsers? Very frustrating! I've spent about a half hour googling the issue and can't figure it out. I'll look into it this weekend.
Unfortunately, until most users have this feature automatically on their bookmarklet upon install, I don't think we can all move to using zero helper punctuation. But I think you definitely have the right idea!
(no subject)
Date: 31 Oct 2009 12:48 am (UTC)