Tags, Wikis, and Zoot

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 17, 2011 at 02:46 PM

I’m not a big fan of Tags as a primary method of organization. The first tab-oriented application I tried was Personal Knowbase (although they call them keywords). I found that my list of keywords always seemed longer than my list of notes. Subsequently, I’ve come to think it requires too much time and pre-cognition on my part as I create a note to figure out all the ways the item could be tagged. I don’t know what a year from now will make sense when it is time to hunt up that item.

For instance, if I save an article about a team of archaeologists from Acme University headed by Dr. Newman who have uncovered a new Neanderthal site in the French Alps, should the tags be archaeology, anthropology, science, France, Dr. Newman, Acme University, Neanderthal, pre-historic man, or what?

As a supplement, tags are useful to me. If, for instance, I’m working on a project and I know that the information can be broken down into four or five categories, I will use tags in that instance. Or, I find tags useful for designating certain limited attributes, such as “urgent” or “follow-up.”

Overall, however, tagging seems to me to be too unwieldy for organizing a great deal of information over a long period of time. And, since most applications have pretty good search functions, extensive tagging just seems redundant.

Wiki linking excited me for a while, but I could never quite get it to work for me as a major organizational tool. For one thing, you generally can’t get a good overview of how your information is organized this way, though ConnectedText and WikidPad each have a tree-like view. I do find creating links this way useful as a navigation assist.

Steve