canspice.org

I’m a recent sign-up to del.icio.us, the social bookmark website. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s essentially public bookmarking. If you see a website that you might want to visit later, you bookmark it on del.icio.us for later viewing. You can also tag a bookmark with one or more keywords that describe the website, which will help you find it later on. For example, I recently bookmarked a story about Fernando Alonso and his strange posing after winning the Bahrain Grand Prix. I tagged it with the “f1″ and “fernando-alonso” keywords.

I can also see who else has bookmarked any sites that I have and which tags they’ve given them. For the Alonso story, doctorvee also bookmarked it, and he tagged it with the “fernando-alonso”, “bahrain-grand-prix”, “spain”, and “bullfighting” tags.

Tagging allows you to discover websites based on specific subjects. Again using my example, if I want to find all the bookmarks people have tagged with the “f1″ tag, I can.

You may have already noticed a limitation to tagging: spaces aren’t allowed, at least not on del.icio.us. While they are on other websites that use tagging (like last.fm), tags on del.icio.us cannot have spaces in them. This leads to three different strategies for multi-word tags:

1. underscore - put an underscore where the space would be. Using my example, I should have used “fernando_alonso” as my tag.
2. mashup - remove the spaces altogether. Using my example, I should have used “fernandoalonso”.
3. hyphen - put a hyphen where the space would be. This is the one I used for “fernando-alonso”.

Each strategy has its pros and its cons. The underscore moves the intervening character to the bottom of the tag, so your eye should gloss over it. The hyphen is marginally easier to type than the underscore and is the same width as the space. You don’t even have to type anything for the mashup. However, the underscore is wider than a space, and the mashup just mashes all the words together so you can’t read things as easily (and it’s likely to cause confusion, as in the “penismightier” comedy option).

I propose that hyphens be used to separate words in del.icio.us multi-word tags. In the interest of being able to harmonize tags on del.icio.us, I urge other del.icio.us users to do the same.