Wayne (at least) likes the idea of trying to get, among bibliobloggers, some measure of commonality to our tagging of posts (as del.ico.us and Technorati allow).
My suggestion is that anyone interested posts their ideas, and out of the discussion some agreement may emerge. To start things off here are some proposals:
Bible Books: use abbreviations, ideally (if we can remember them) those suggested by the SBL manual of Style e.g. gen, exod, lev etc... the alternative would be to use the full English names e.g. Genesis, Exodus etc.... Laziness suggests abbreviations, though the easy tools may make the full name almost as quick and both more meaningful and less likely to throw up false positives in a search...
For things relating to open scholarship I suggest open.theology and open.biblical.studies, as I propose biblical.studies for posts relating to the discipline in general.
"minimalist" seems to me a useful tag to include discussion of issues relating to minimalism and maximalism (even if we have reservations about the terms! [NB, the Blogger spell checker offers "machinelike" as an alternative for maximalist!? Jim will be pleased ;) ]
And that's enough for tonight, I am off for a spa and bed!
PS In the morning Wayne suggests in an email that since Technorati and del.ico.us treat compound tags differently we need to take account of this, he says they both tolerate hyphens, so if this is right my proposal for e.g. "open.biblical.studies" should become "open-biblical-studies".
PPS At work by now... Wayne (Better Bibles Blog)has done more research and writes:
The only character I know of that neither Technorati nor Del.icio.us will accept is a blank space. They both interpret that as separating one tag from another. Technorati allows the + sign to join binomials and they can be access on Technorati searches as two full words. Del.icio.us interprets the + sign as something else. Both systems allow hyphens and underscores. And both allow separated words in the view field of the tag.So, my thought on such "binomials" is that since D & T both seem to they read . or - as equivalent we use whichever of the two the tagger prefers! But standardise on these two (for now at least)...
I just tried period word separators on Technorati and they work fine. Periods work on Del.icio.us also, in fact, that system seems to accept open.source and open-source as being the same tag, which is good.
So, your open.biblical.studies tag should be just fine. It will show up great in Del.icio.us. It will also work in Technorati, but Technorati might interpret open+biblical+studies as being a different tag from open.biblical.studies. At this point, I would lean toward using your tags with period separators since there is already some academic precedence for that. Similarly, with phone numbers (except in the U.S., but people in the U.S. are getting used to periods for separating parts of phone numbers).
¶ 9:27 PM
[to Del.icio.us]
Maximalist = machinelike.... Yes- I do like it! And it's so accurate!
By 
Jim, at
August 23, 2005 8:24 AM
I've been meaning to post -- I too have been playing with tags. I like your suggestions. I have been using the period as well, e.g., Dead.Sea.Scrolls, Textual.Criticism. The only thing that I have found is if someone searches Technorati tags for "Textual Criticism" posts tagged "Textual.Criticism" are not found. I don't know if this issue is enough for me to change, but I don't like it nonetheless. Any ideas?
By Tyler F. Williams, at
August 25, 2005 3:49 PM
Having worked as a computing scientist for nearly 30 years specialising in text-retrieval systems (aka search engines) I find "tagging" unhelpful. With Google's site specific searches there isn't much need for keywording schemes, indeed using styles such as the SBL positively hinder searching.
By Trevor Jenkins, at
August 26, 2005 12:09 AM
Tyler, I'll be interested to hear more of your experiences.
Trevor, I'm puzzled, how does adding del.ico.us tags to posts make the site any less searchable? I'd have thought the effect on a search engine (since these are tags in the body of the document) would have little or no effect. But they do allow me to find posts that heuristically "fit" together even if they use different words... (And if other bibliogloggers use similar lists then I can find material they think fits that category too!)
By Tim, at
August 26, 2005 6:54 AM
Perhaps the main reason that I started using tags is so that I can have a keyword index on my blog so that if someone wants to see all of my posts on Dead Sea Scrolls they can. I guess they could just use the google search I also provided and search for DSS, but then they would have to sort through the hits. From what I can see, WordPress includes such a category feature which tempts me to switch over (though the amount of word involved in the switch would probably be prohibative)
