People who use the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us to tag their favorite pages can clear up the mystery behind the tags they use when their meanings are not readily apparent.
Josh Schacter and company have been busy behind the scenes of Delicious. In recent months, they have updated the Delicious Firefox extension, and worked on scaling the application as another 500,000 users joined the one million counted back in September 2006.
The latest news from Schacter discussed a new feature that he’d wanted for years – tag descriptions:
(W)hen I was working as an IT administrator for a non-profit agency, I was scrambling to find a free or low-cost tracking system I could use to manage their IT issues in a sane fashion. I went into research mode and bookmarked a lot of sites under my “issuetracking” tag. Now, looking back, I wish I could comment a little on that tag about what I found and what I ultimately decided to do… but how? Enter our latest feature: tag descriptions.
For any of your tags, you can now add a public title and description to appear at the top of the page. It may just be to remind yourself of what it is or to tell others more about it. To get started, just visit one of your tags and click “create description” (at the top).
Before leaping into your user profile to try this out, keep in mind that tag descriptions are always public. Users can title the tag description and provide a 1,000 character definition for it. After all, when you tag something as Cthulhu, just because you know where it will lead doesn’t mean that everyone else will.
