Tagging: A Shitty Solution to a Stupid Problem
For the sake of the search engines, I’ve just started tagging entries. I went back and retroactively added a tags and installed a plugin to help deal with them. They’re a pain in the ass.
The idea is that when I write a post, I include a bunch of words or short phrases in the metadata that describe what I’m writing about. The tags for this one are inevitably going to include “software quality” and “software,” and probably “geek,” maybe “blogging.” I do this so search engines and blog tracking sites can do a better job of matching what I’m writing about with what people seem to want to read. It also leads to things like tag clouds, which are great for roughly nothing1.
The deep problem that we’re up against is that computers are really dumb. If I talk about software and mention bugs, it will take a long time for a computer to figure out that I don’t mean bugs in general. Despite the fact that I’m clearly saying the two are unrelated, the fact that I linked both of them in one article means they’ll get slightly closer in the search engines. And when you add metaphors, satire, similes, etc, computers fall apart entirely. A surprising number of humans can’t handle it either, but we’re talking about a level of fail never before seen.
This amounts to going over what I write, doing the first level conceptual digestion, and picking the largest lumps of crap that come out of it2. It feels like telling a joke and then explaining it in detail. But if to get meaningful use out of things like Technorati, then, as they say in the parlance of the streets, those are the breaks.
1) If you’re an idiot and you’d like to know the buzzwords surrounding some new buzzword you’ve heard, they’re very effective. I don’t endorse technology that helps buzzword-driven idiots fail to function more effectively. They’re also useful for figuring out how other people are tagging similar articles.
2) And with that, software bugs get a bit closer to dung beetles and tapeworms.
