I spent a couple of good hours going through this ye ole blog to deal with scattered blogging tags. For example, I had a handful of posts marked blogging, this and that, musings, and life. It made a lot more sense to me if I labeled all non-book-review posts plainly as musings and delete the others.
That decision was easy. The difficult ones were when I chose more specific tags: bullying, suicide, friendship, cutting, death & dying, etc. I just wasn't consistent enough to mark ALL books based on their themes. Ideally, I'd wish that I kept it up. It would be nice if I could just go to one place and grab a list of books that all had to do with bullying and then recommend them to individuals.
But see, the true problem is I over-think the decision. Especially if a book doesn't really have a theme. Like, what about Jodi Piccoult books? Would it make sense just to list them as "family issues" because EACH BOOK has a specific issue that it deals with. That's after all, the appeal that I have for JP, she explores relevant issues in contemporary society. I suppose I could mark them as social commentary, but then that sounds super vague.
Also, what if the book is just a love story? Don't mark any type of theme? I end up struggling with some books that don't seem to have a theme OR genre. Like Maeve Binchy. I've only read and rambled about one of those books, back some three years ago when I started blogging, but Tara Road was just a dramatic family story that I think I listed it as contemporary fiction? I don't know. Should I consider contemporary fiction the same as realistic fiction? Or do you guys mark realistic fiction as such even if it is historical (I'm thinking of Lonesome Dove here).
Do you see? I can turn this into a mental conundrum that keeps me up late at night because of my indecisive nature. I've even gone through a time where I wanted to tag the books based on centuries and decades.
I get stuck in my head about these things, ultimately getting to the point where I just wish some magical gnomes would invade my blogger account and do the deed for me. Ha! I need labeling instructions.
The irony of all of this is I can't even remember the last time I looked at my label cloud on the ole blog.
Am I the only one who gets bogged down by such silly things as labeling? If not, what is your solution?
I used to get bogged down, especially trying to find genre categories for every book! Now, though, I just label things like so: "books," "reviews," "Weight loss," "family," "writing." etc. very broad categories, the less specific the better!
ReplyDeleteYou're definitely not alone - the librarian in me definitely obsessed over tags :P I avoid overly specific ones because when you have a gazillion different ones they lose their useful. Basically, what Amanda said :P
ReplyDeleteI've never labelled anything and from how brain stressful it sounds, I don't think I want to! Hehe. But I do get like obsessed over other blog things, so you're not alone in that, don't worry! :)
ReplyDeleteI would definitely get caught up in all that which is why I don't label the genres, lol!
ReplyDeleteI've always understood tags help search engines find your posts, so I do tag, but just with that in mind. I've never used the tags to search old posts myself.
ReplyDeleteI've also always suspected that post over one year old are ignored by search engines altogether, so I've never gone back to tag the older posts.