A Totally Minor Gripe...

Ok, so Yahoo 360 has caught up with the rest of the world and included tagging on blog posting.

Woohoo!

That's not to say that they bothered - EVIDENTLY - to tell anyone how to use it, and it's SCREAMINGLY apparent that some people have no idea what it's for.

This is nitpicky, but Jeesus, folks, come on.

You're not supposed to create new tags for EVERY SINGLE POST YOU EVER MAKE.

You're supposed to use the tags to group your entries by content, so people can come to your blog and, say, click "politics" in your tag cloud and see a list of ONLY the political entries on your blog. The tag cloud even highlights the tags that have more associated posts, so someone can look at a glance and find out what issues constitute the majority of your content, saving visitors some time in making decisions about whether they want to read your posts.

When you make 5,000 goddamn tags, you totally defeat the purpose of this.

It's your blog. You can if you want to. But it makes the whole feature completely pointless when you abuse it so flagrantly.

See, if you have a small tag cloud, it's a convenience for your readers.

If you have a huge goddamn tag OMGWTF, then you have created something that's A. not useful to your readers, and B. really taking up a lot of sidebar space for no damn reason.

Like I said. It's yours; do what you want with it.

But it is a total waste of an otherwise really useful feature.

[*Edited to add: The Yahoo 360 team talks about tagging. And speaking of, here's what they said about it the first time:

"
Blog Tagging: A lot of Yahoo! 360° users have asked for easier ways to categorize your blog entries, so we’re introducing the concept called blog tags.
New to the idea of tags? Don’t worry; it’s really not that tough. Think of blog tags as keywords or categories — you can assign multiple tags to your blog entries, and if you ever need to reference the entries again, click one of the tags in the tag cloud on the left of the Blog View page. For example, clicking the “blogtopic” tag brings up all our former blog-topic-of-the-day entries. Go ahead and experiment with tags on your own blog; they’ll make a lot more sense once you play around with them.
They're pretty useful, but we know that tags are a new concept for a lot of people, so we plan on having a separate blog entry about them later.
"

That last comes from this entry from December.*]