Tagging

On the old version of LondonCommons.net, if you wanted to put your content into categories so that it would be linked with similar content your only option was to select from a list of sections (e.g. Art, Politics, Life etc).

This has been replaced with "tags". Tags are common on many modern websites, including for example Youtube and Flickr. Tags are categories. They're used to link similar content together. The new thing about tags is that new tags (or new categories) to be created on the fly. If the category (or tag) you think your content belongs in doesn't exist, simply typing it into the tags field on the content authoring form will create it.

With tags, users can create new categories that the site developers could not have thought off. Simply type in the tags you want attached to your content separated by commas. A single tag can be multiple words, but if you use a comma it will be divided up into two tags.

Please don't create duplicate or meaningless tags

However, the thing about tags is they only work if people re-use existing tags. The website will help you with this automatically. When you start typing in the tags field on the authoring form, it will drop-down with a list of suggested existing tags based on what you've typed into the field so far. For example you could type the letters "ar" and it will show you a list of existing tags including art, art-show, party etc.

If you create a duplicate tag that is simply spelled differently, your content won't be bunched in together with the original tag. For example, if there is already a series of articles with the tag "city hall" and you tag your new blog post "city hall politics" you new blog won't get shown along with the other content tagged with the original spelling "city hall". In general creating duplicate tags is counter productive. It's best to re-use tags as much as possible to make your content easier to find and cause less "tag pollution" on the site.

Another guideline to follow is that new tags should more general than specific. Since the point of tags is linking content together, it does not make sense to create a tag that will only ever have one lonely piece of content in it.

Combining Tags

Tags can also be combined. For example, if there are already two tags, one called local, the other called art, it doesn't make sense to create a third tag "local art" when you could just use both of the existing tags (by typing "local, art" into the tags field).

Example