There is an interesting post at canspice.org about tagging (not to be confused with the tagging that you get with memes).

Tagging already has a couple of well-known problems. One of the major ones is the confusion over whether you should use singular or plural. Flickr cleverly bypassed the other problem — words such as ‘bush’ that have two meanings — by creating clusters.

Tagging is about as trendy as it gets these days. You’re setting up a website — but if it hasn’t got tagging involved somewhere, you can take your arse right out of Web 2.0. We don’t need the likes of you around here.

The problem is that each site implements tags completely differently. The plugin that I use to tag posts on my blog automatically converts hyphens into spaces so that when, for instance, somebody searches for ‘formula 1‘ on Technorati, the posts that I tagged with ‘formula-1′ will appear.

Flickr is slightly more restrictive. Spaces are allowed, but you’ve got to stick quotation marks around any tags with more than one word.

del.icio.us is even more restrictive — it won’t let you use spaces at all. So I decided to use the next best thing, which in my view was the hyphen. Unfortunately, most people seem to use what Brad at canspice.org calls the mashup technique. Search for ‘formula-1‘ on del.icio.us and just about all of the entries are posted by me; searching for ‘formula1‘ brings up far more links.

Brad outlined why he thinks more people should use hyphens rather than underscores or the ‘mashup’ technique. The problem is, with the whole tagging idea being that it’s driven from the bottom-up, it’s going to be difficult to get everybody using a standard.

Do many people actually care about tags anyway though?

First of all, I am so sorry sorry sorry for writing this post. I thought I had grown out of writing about blogging, but it’s just a bad habit; an itch you have to scratch. Clearly I have had a lot of thoughts about blogging since whenever the last time I wrote about it was. As such this is an embarassingly long and rambling post. Apologies. Anybody who reaches the end gets a sweetie.

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Since some time yesterday every Blogger / blogspot.com hosted blog has been displayed with a red exclamation mark next to it in Bloglines. Which is bad news.

I’ve heard a lot of Blogger users moaning recently. But the feeds themselves seem to still exist so I’m kind of confused. Is Google / Blogger blocking Bloglines or something? What’s going on? I’d like to be able to use Bloglines to, you know, read blogs.

I’ve stuck a coComment box up there. I think coComment is a fantastic idea. I’ve wanted to have something like this on my blog for a while. The only thing is, it doesn’t work for an awful lot of blogs. I must have posted about a dozen comments since I started using coComment, and only three of them have worked so far. Still, I guess it’s better than nothing.

When the coComment box gets bigger I’ll probably have to re-jig the header section again. In the meantime, the cringeworthy ‘About me’ box has been ousted. It’s probably a good idea to keep all that stuff on the actual ‘about me’ page.

I just got told to download the new version of Windows Live Messenger Beta, and it’s another radical change. Too many people must have died of shock after seeing the last version, because it is right back to basics. I imagine things will still change quite a lot before it comes out of beta because it doesn’t quite feel cohesive yet. Sometimes the wee man icon is a nice modern-looking glassy thing, and sometimes it’s a grey pixellated 1990s monstrosity.

At first I didn’t like the highlighting thing that the previous version did — when everybody’s name would expand to two lines when you hovered over it. But I got used to it, and by the end I actually quite liked it, even if it sometimes made actually trying to talk to the right person a bit more difficult. I had assumed that that was the reason why the display picture no longer appeared on the contacts list — but we’re back to basics and the display pictures aren’t back. I quite liked that feature. It feels like a backward step now. One welcome advance (and it’s not really an advance because this happened in ye olde MSN Messenger anyway) is that the “personal messages” are now easier to tell apart from the contact name.

Actual features like timestamps, offline messages and shared folders are all still there, but they now feel like they’ve been lopped on to a five-year-old interface — some parts look nice and shiny, other parts look old and ragged. As I said, though, I’m sure that will change before it comes out of beta. I’m just surprised that they’ve taken away all the radical interface ideas. It must have been seriously unpopular.