Like many sites out ther I have added tags to Eclectic Echoes through the excellent WordPress plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior. Not especially ground-breaking news, no doubt, but one of the things that I do really like about the implementation in Ultimate Tag Warrior is that I can define tag synonyms in the backend. This is one area where I think many of the tag implementations such as at Flickr fall a bit short of the mark. Of course at sites like Flickr it would be hard to implement synonyms well because different people have vastly different vocabularies dependant on culture, experience, context, etc.
Here in a controlled environment though the use of synonyms makes tags even more powerful for me. For instance I have a number of Osprey photos and related entries here on Eclectic Echoes. I have tried to be consistant with tagging them all with the tags “osprey”, “raptor”, “bird” and “Pandion+halieatus” (the last being the binomial scientific name of the Osprey). While I have tried, I have often failed to tag them consistently. With synonyms though I have set “pandion+halieatus” and “osprey” to be synonyms, ensuring that any tag search for one will return all the relevant entries tagged with either tag. I still have to work on being more deliberate in taggin entries well as even synonyms doesn’t help if entries aren’t tagged at all or the case of “raptor” or “bird” above. All osprey are birds, but not all birds are osprey, type of thing.
At any rate, I am continuing to work on tagging some older entries a bit at a time, and will put a tag search function in here in the near future, but at this point by clicking one of the tags you can get all entries with that tag easily. Going to eclecticechoes.com/tag/johann/ for instance will bring up all entries tagged with “johann”. I will probably also add links to Technorati, del.icio.us and flickr from the tag archive pages. I say probably, mainly because many tags have questionable carry through to those services:
Osprey: Locally, at Technorati, at del.icio.us and at flickr.
In this particular case the only one that really works (connects to related subject matter) is flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us have more links about the aircraft (civilian and the Navy V-22), backpacks and peer to peer software than the bird.
