Something struck me while I was reading Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere (Feb 2006, Part 1). It wasn't what he was saying about the growing number of bloggers, nor was it the relationship between daily postings and newsworthy events. What got me was tags. It wasn't even the part about how tagging is on the rise, but rather the tags used to tag this particular blog posting:

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogs, blogsearch, postingvolume, posts, postvolume, pr, scaling, search, search engine, sotb, sotb2006, spam, spamblog, statistics, stats, tags, technorati, technoratijapan, technoratitag, weblog

What got me was the style that he used to tag his entries. Here is another set of tags from a different entry:

Technorati Tags: blogsearch, developer, employment, job, joboffer, joboffered, php, san francisco, technorati

See, if I were to tag either of those entries, my set of tags on the first entry would be: blog, search, postvolume, pr, scaling, search, sotb, 2006, spam, stats, tags, technorati, japan. the tags blogosphere, blogsearch, search engine, sotb2006, spamblog, statistics, technoratijapan and technoratitag are, in the way that I approach tagging, redundant and like weeds in my personal tag garden. Now this is not to say that the founder of Technorati doesn't know how to tag. It is just to say that our style of tag-gardening is different. I tag my blog entries for personal storage and retrieval. If I want to find all of the posts I made about my music, I would do a search on the tag intersection of "music" and "mine". If I want to talk about PHP jobs, I would search for the (currently hypothetical) intersection between php and jobs. I depend on tag intersections giving me the information I need. This allows me to do things like get a list of blog postings that I have done related to my creative output (musical, programming, artistic or otherwise) by hitting the tag mine. I can drill into, our out of tags as needed.

Now, the approach that Mr Sifry takes seems to be different. If I may venture a guess as to how and why he is tagging, I'll lay bets that he is tagging for the world around him. The overloading of terms (job, joboffer, joboffered) seems more intent on making an impression on a search engine (like technorati, for instance) rather then for personal organization. Given that his blog rating is at ranking 811, versus 574,635 (my own ranking) this makes sense.

So, how you tag depends on what you use tags for. I want to be able to collect and search my own material (photos, blog entries, bookmarks, etc.), and I find searching on tag intersections much more interesting and edifying, so I format my tags accordingly, and spend a lot of time pruning and taking care of my tag gardens. But it makes me wonder if the tag gardens I am growing are the most user friendly in the world.