If you’re not already aware, I’m a keen user of the social bookmarking service Delicious (previously known as del.icio.us). When I’m browsing the Internet and find something of interest, be it a blog post, news article or entire website, I hit the handy bookmarklet in my browser and store it for future reference.

The other beauty of social bookmarking is the ability to share your favourite website links to both your own social network and the general public.

There are three main ways of discovering the links you bookmark on Delicious:

• the Popular Bookmarks page
• a user’s profile page (or the appropriate RSS feed)
• searching for specific tags

That final one is key to the operation of Delicious and the value it has added to the search engine industry. When Yahoo! acquired Delicious back in 2005, they realised what possibilities could come from the underlying meta data users were adding to webpage URLs. Not only was the popularity of certain webpages adding weight, the descriptive tags users were applying to their links were helping search engines know what to present to users while searching.

So this brings me back to my original point - tagging.

I religously make an effort to tag all my bookmarks with as many useful tags as possible, mainly for my own purpose but also to aide other users in finding appropriate content with descriptive searches.

Strangely, I’ve started to realise a pattern in the sort of tags I use too. They normally fall within the following patterns:

• the product title or name
• topic category or categories
• the author(s)
• the source or referer
• any useful adjectives and nouns

All the tags are usually normalized too, mainly because user queries are entered lowercase but also to group multi-threaded words together. For example, “The Guardian” would become “theguardian” or “Yahoo!” becomes “yahoo“. I’m not suggesting this is the best solution to a difficult issue of standardizing tagging - it’s just my preferred method.

My motivation for this post is to see how other people prefer to tag content. Are there any “standards” you adopt or are you quite relaxed about the format you use? Do you prefer alternative methods to those I’ve outlined above?

I’d be interested to get some feedback on this.