‘Tagging’ the act of putting keywords onto something is such a strange sounding/feeling task, but one we are increasingly used to with blogs, sites like Flickr, and here at WildObs. Tagging is flexible in that there is no set way to tag something, you get to chose. In that power is some complexity.

Tagging an encounter allows you to group a number of (perhaps otherwise unrelated) encounters together. It is best to try to tag encounters as you record them, while the encounter memory is vivid/fresh in your mind.

Here are some ideas on how you could implement tags:

• Some fun tags: cool, scary, ugly-yet-cute, out-of-place
• When on a wildobsing trip group encounters with tags: yellowstone2009, ak-10-09
• Perhaps set personal tags: goal-2009
• Or use community ones: id-request, out-of-place, first-of-season

Some folks say “keep a short list of tags you use frequently/consistently” and “avoid adding the first 20 things that come to your mind” and adding to that others say “it is better to combine a lot of simple tags than dream up complicated ones”. I would add … try to avoid putting the location or date/time or species name (although latin is always fun into tags since those are already captured in the wildobs system.

Default Tags setting