Tags

I do not have a good handle on tags. I hardly ever use them. Searching seems to work as well, if not better most of the time.

Just so we are clear, tags are labels that are used to classify documents like emails and blog posts. I know Google likes them. I imagine other outfits probably use them as well.

I never seem to know how to classify things. Some things are fairly obvious, some are not. But mostly, how do I tell which tag have I used previously for a similar item? I seem to have an endless list of tags, so long that it seemed pointless, so long that I took it off of my blog.

The other problem is some posts require so many tags it seems ridiculous. It takes as long to tag a post as it does to write it.

A couple of weeks ago I said forget it. Since tags are so useless and so troublesome and I can't seem to come up with a clear plan, I decided to just quite using them all together.

Then I put up a post about the Navy's rail gun research project, which involved some very high speed photography, and I wanted to reference another post I had done that also involved the military and high speed photography. I knew what the picture looked like, but I didn't recall when I had made the post or what I had said about it. I tried searching six ways from Sunday but could not find it. Finally I tried the tag Guns, and presto, there it was.

So now I'm back to using tags.