Coin ‘Em And Tag ‘Em

PithArtist

As we move through our live Beta, some CTP users have asked what exactly the deal is with the tags that we ask you use when you coin a new phrase.  What are the right terms to use for a newly entered phrase?

First off, let’s look at what tags are.  As you move through the blogosphere, you have surely noticed that posts are annotated with tags that indicate what the post is about.  These, like at CTP (and here at the  CTP blog) are short descriptors of the content and context of the thing being tagged.

So let’s say you were to coin the phrase “Haste Makes Waste”  – an old Benjamin Franklin classic.  How could you tag it with useful and appropriate tags?

I can think of a few tags that work by thinking about the searcher – that is, thinking about the person who is clicking on a tag and what they should see when they click or search.  I ask myself “what words, when searched/clicked, should show this phrase?”

With that, I can think of a few good tags:

advice – because old Ben Franklin’s phrase is in fact “opinion about what should be done” (freedictionary.com)

aphorisms – because it’s also “an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and easily memorable form (wikipedia.com)

business – once you figure out the phrase is advice, it’s good to expand on that by asking “what kind of advice is it?”  It’s definitely good business advice.

Ben Franklin -  because this quote is commonly attributed to US Founding Father Benjamin Franklin – who, by the way, would have loved Coin That Phrase.  CTP is built on wit, words and printing – all three were central obsessions of his!

All of these are valid.  You also have to know when to stop; it doesn’t for example, make sense to tag the entry as “Colonial American” solely because that’s Franklin’s era.  The phrase isn’t locked into any one specific era, so tagging it as such is a bad idea.

Think about how you’d want to find your phrases, then coin ‘em and tag ‘em!