I'd like to know, for myself and others, what are the most effective ways to use tags on VideoSift? Originally, I used capital letters and was precise. Now I use the title and incorporate lower-casing. So, what is the lowdown?
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The following HTML tags are allowed in everyone's comments:
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For me that means all-lowercase, but I agree there should be a standard (or all tags could be automagically shifted to lower case or title case).
I took a pass at the same subject a year and a half ago, and here's what I got...
http://howto.videosift.com/talk/Regarding-Tags-and-Tagging
South Park, Eric Cartman, trey parker,
not: south, park, eric, cartman, trey, parker
Searching for "south" gives me crap on a stick.
Moreover the tags can hint at what's in the video, so people with their nano-second attention spans can get another incentive to actually watch the video.
- case is irrelevant.
- search and related videos treat words in the title the same as tags, so there's no need to repeat words in tags that are already part of the title.
- partial matches work on tags. no need to put "kitten, kittens" in there.
Regarding the issue of repeating terms in title and tags, it's encouraged because if someone wants to find similar posts, they should just have to click a tag rather than copy/paste or re-type a term into the search box.
When you click a tag, it starts a search for an *exact* match only. This means clicking "kitten" will search for only videos with exactly "kitten" in the title, tags, or summary, but will not find videos with "kittens" and without "kitten". This is so because there are many terms where you do not want to find substring matches. This means it's okay to add repetitive tags like "kitten,kittens".
Regarding commas, you should not separate persons' names. E.g., instead of "jon,stewart" use "jon stewart" because when separated by commas, a person could only click to search for videos containing "jon" or videos containing "stewart". Without the comma, users can click to search for "jon stewart" videos (or they could just refer to the top 15 sidebar).
In addition to what is mentioned above, I think it's very important that the tags are quite exhaustive regarding the contents of the video, to make it as likely as possible to come up in a search. I've discovered a lot of dupes that could be blamed solely on insufficient or altogether lacking tags on the original video.
Word.
Use tags that someone might use to search for the video, not silly descriptions that are funny and clever. getting a dupe on a post usually happens when someone else's tags are so poor, the obvious searches don't bring it up.
I don't have the time to go looking right now..., but those who do this know who they are.
"Put the clever comments in the description field, not the tags!"
Oh, here's one (Sorry alien_concept)
http://www.videosift.com/video/How-To-Make-The-Ladies-Love-You-While-On-The-Rag
"chocolate bread pudding, oh my fucking god, my diet is over"
Another thing is some people don't use enough tags or descriptive enough tags...
Like this one (sorry jdbates):
http://www.videosift.com/video/Neko-Case-John-Saw-That-Number
The Tags are "music, concert, live" -- How about a person's name, song name, location, something that identifies the performance.
This one has NO Commas at all...
http://www.videosift.com/video/Snow-Falling
"snow falling uttarakhand uttaranchal bainji kandai dashjula"
I also have to mention, that after a quick look, there are also a lot of people who use the Tags quite well - so Kudos to those people! and Thanks!
Actually, I haven't/wouldn't change someone else's tags. I have however, sent the odd message asking politely, if someone could please ad a tag or fix a tag error on their own post.
thats why i have hired the excellent services of Krono and Rasch.they have retagged just about every video i have submitted.i highly recommend their services!
whats that?
oh yeah...the check is the mail you two!
/whistles as he walks away innocently