I was walking home the other day, poking at my iPhone (as usual), and for the eleven billionth time frustration arose over my disorganized Delicious tag library. It's not that I don't have tag naming standards or that I've been neglectful. It's just hard to remember whether the tag I tend to use is idea or ideas or whether it makes more sense to tag something as PalmPre or two tags: Palm and Pre.

So why haven't the folks at Delicious added much-needed features¹ like tag aliasing, parenting, and contextual categorization to their service? Why was their last major release merely a performance improvement with no real new features? (Okay, they added new features, just nothing too exciting.)

Then it hit me: Delicious is simply a basic yet open-ended social network for bookmarking; much like Twitter is for micro-blogging. However, unlike Twitter, I've seen very few attempts² to add functionality to Delicious through it's tagging system; only tools that aggregate existing Delicious content.

With this said, I think it's time for us web app developers to build tools for Delicious that:

1. Clean up existing bookmarks through user-specified rules (i.e. de-pluralization).
2. Provide additional features and actions triggered by a special tag syntax.
3. Organize bookmarks through parenting rules specified with a special tag syntax.

Here's my first shot at an agreed syntax to help achieve these goals (so all our tools work together), based on conventions in use and non-conflicting characters:

context:…

• A simple way to specify the context of a tag. This is for situations when the tag doesn't really describe the bookmarked site, but rather some side information about the product or reason for bookmarking.
• example: on:iPhone could be used instead of just iPhone to help differentiate that the site isn't really about the iPhone itself, it just describes a product that runs only on the iPhone.
• example: idea:webdesign or idea:SuperSecretProject could be used to signify that the site is not directly about web design or your code-named SuperSecretProject; it's just a cool idea in the realm of web design or inspiration for SuperSecretProject.
• Search/viewing tools could have options to count the prefix and the suffix as a whole tag (like normal) or as pieces (so that on:iPhone would come up when you do a tag lookup for iphone).

action:…

• An extension of the context:… syntax; this invokes an action or connection to another system (much like the built-in for:username syntax). These actions could happen the first time a new bookmark with the chosen prefix is noticed or could be tied to the existence of any and all bookmarks with the prefix.
• example: todo:… could be hooked up to automatically turn the bookmark into a task in a personal organization system. When task is completed, the tag(s) on the bookmark could be changed from todo:read to done:read.

category>… or …<category

• Used to categorize classification hierarchy in the oh-so-common situation where the name itself isn't specific enough or isn't normally used alone.
• This would also allow one to build a search/viewing tool that filters by just categories, just categorized tags, normal and categorized tags, or otherwise.
• example: Google>Wave could be used to clarify that the site is about Google's upcoming Wave service, not the surf wave report for the San Francisco bay area.
• example: Puget<Sound could be used to tag resources on Puget Sound, while not confusing them with resources on sound (audio) and allowing you to find all your Sound (body of water) resources with a search for “<Sound”.

I tried to think of any use-cases that wouldn't fit into these constructs and the only situation I found was if you didn't want to rely on 3rd-party search/viewing tools. In that case, Apple>iPhone>3GS could be expanded by a tool into the additional tags Apple, iPhone, 3GS, and Apple>iPhone, iPhone>3GS; but that's just unnecessary messiness and complexity (such as matching pieces of those hierarchies to each other).

I also wanted to stay away from floating categorization tags (i.e. just OperatingSystems> or work:), since I believe that tying a category to a particular tag promotes better tag use and cleans up situations like bookmarking a site for multiple purposes. Plus, this is what tag bundles were built for (although a tool could automatically populate bundles…). There may still be a need for a tool that sweeps your bookmarks and fixes capitalization or pluralization, but that's probably best handled off-site and not tied to the tagging systems (don't get me started on the horrors of inventing tags like settings:depluralize:true).

So that's it; I'm going to start converting my tags over to these new syntaxes in preparation for new tools that view my bookmarks based on these formats; for the time being, I think I'll code up a portion of this site to show context:… tags of my choice as a proof-of-concept.

Fellow Delicious-ers, you may commence your opinion-penning below.

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