Come on people, wake up and TAG, please

Fight Club. 236 people watched it. 138 have rated it (not bad, thats slmost 60%. But the most common tag 'action' has only 8 hits? Come on folks, we can do much better than that.

Listal rocks, but without tags, its missing out on a major part of its purpose, which is to help others find good movies. You don't have to tag a dozen keywords, trying to remember the plot of the movie, but if everyone went thru their list and at least added ONE tag, such as category (action, comedy, drama, romance, thriller... you get the point), it would benefit the whole listal community so much more than just rating movies.

And if you are having a brain fart and can't think of how to group a particular movie, click on its IMDB link and see what genre it's in.

I've been whining about this since I joined. There's a plenitude of platitudes I could spout, but why bother. I tag, you tag, I've noticed a bit more tagging over time. Perhaps if/when Tom gets around to revamping the tagging more people will start tagging or maybe not. I suggest relaxing and dealing with what you can (tend your 'garden'); this is suposed to be fun or something (I'm mostly interested in keeping track of my stuff).

I do tend to my garden, but I think I can still yell at my neighbors if they let their lawn get all brown. :)

But I agree about the revamped tagging idea. If certain things like 'auto-tag from IMDB' which would take the top genre tags and add them to the movie, or type-ahead tagging so people can easily see what tags they already used, or click on the popular tags on the Edit page to auto-add them, all those might help. or not. i dunno. maybe drastic measures are needed such as a nag screen if someone adds a movie without any tag? ;)

I try to tag a bit everyday, I do come across problems mostly with books I've not read yet. Then it takes me awhile to look them up and see how they're tagged elsewhere.

So I think/hope more folks will tag as more tags are here for them to see and copy.

And I'd like to add that on top of the obvious community benefit of tagging, it will help you organize your collection so much better. If you have a list of 300+ items, it becomes hard to find anything. Add key tags like genre, or decade of movies ( i found exact year to be issue in having too many tags, so i group things in 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, etc, and for recent stuff, I tag it based on year). Also adding tags such a 'biography' or 'based on book' or 'oscar winner' or 'Disney' or 'Pixar', well, you get the idea, even if your collection gets to be over 500+, you can really quickly find movies, and once Tom implements multi-tag searching, you will be able to really fine-tune quick searches of your library, such as 'comedy+1970s+drugs'.

Happy tagging, everyone.

I just started tagging last week and I've gone through my DVDs and books and some of my music but there's still a lot of work ahead of me :)

It's time-consuming but it's worth it.

thanks, santos.

I hate to be argumentative but I don't like the auto-tagging idea. One of the things I find interesting while browsing through a person's library is seeing what (if any) strange or unexpected tags may be added. It seems like auto-tagging would prohibit more personal tagging by giving people something "good enough". Does that make any sense?

I do like the idea of type-ahead tagging for tags already used by you.

well not auto-tag by default, but I was thinking more of a button that says 'suggest a tag from IMDB' or something to that effect. If people are lazy, they can start with the one or two tags that would be taken from imdb, and then they can still add any extra tags they want.

and the auto-type tags that you already have used in past, I mentioned it sometime ago, but the way its done in blinklist.com is awesome. you get so used to it, just hit 'c', a mini-box appears with 'comedy, crime, christmas', basically anything that starts with 'c', and you can use arrow keys to select it, hit enter, and its done. no more worries about typos, or forgetting what tags you used for other movies.

I'd like to be able to use existing tags from a particular thing - in the Fight Club example, there are a bunch of tags, and it would be great if you could click something on those tags and add it to 'your' tags.

It would also be nice to be able to help people out with spelling... I understand that there are multiple spellings for some words (like favorite and favourite), but I've seen some tags that look like the person guessed and missed out (like spelling dramma or actoin).

yes, thanks for mentioning this again.

(maybe we need to start a thread in listal development for this?)

I said it before and i'll keep saying it again and again, nobody does tagging better than blinklist.com. Everything you mentioned is implemented in a slick way, and i'd love to see Listal apply similar tagging tricks. Clicking on common tags adds them to list of your tags automatically, and on-the-fly auto-type and auto-suggest make typing tags super easy and virtually error free.

I don't have as big collections as some people, but I'm trying to tag everything I own, and add pictures if there aren't any. I wish more people would tag, even though I do like getting points.

I love tagging, but I've actually ran out of things I can tag (apart from some of my wanted lists, which I'm thinking of doing soon). I'm more focussed on tagging people at the moment because I love being able to look through stuff to find lots of new stuff that way too.

I agree that many more people need to tag. I keep missing out on really cool stuff because it's not tagged. :P

NO. I refuse to do anymore tagging until an auto tag of some kind is added,

I've made up a whole whack of different tags, but I hate typing them in each time.

I need a check box of tags I've already added.

tagging i think is useful for two key things:

1. help discover specific movies

2. help organize some of our massive movie lists

Unfortunately, it's failing big time in number 1 at the moment, for 2 reasons, IMO. First, when i search for movies with 'Comedy', it sorts them by # of watched, even if comedy tag was entered just once (such as 'fight club' example). I think an easy fix (or maybe its not so easy fix) is to sort it by # of times that particular tag is entered. Secondly, not many people tag, which is partly due to confusion of them, and partly because of nothing to simply adding tags (auto-type, auto-suggest, etc.) As far as I know, Tom is working on a plan for that aspect. So if very few people tag, then they're not very useful right now to search for specific movies.

As for point 2, helping organize our private collections, I think its absolutely awesome for that, other than perhaps adding auto-type would really really help. I tagged all my movies, so I can now easily find, example, a Czech Comedy, or a Black & white mystery, or a 1970s action movie. It was a pain to set it all up, but it's really helping out now when I can't remember a particular movie by name. In fact, if i could search for even more than just two tags, that would be better still. show me all 1980s comedies that took place in Africa -- 1980s, comedy, africa.