Directory Basics

A FoodAnswersOnline directory is a set of resources (generally webpages but also other items like image, PowerPoint and PDF files that have a public URL) on the Web selected by you, searchable for you and all your friends. Note that resources saved by you also appear in All Directories searches, available to all members, and in the watchlist of other members who add you to his or her list. You may control the visibility of any or all of your saved resources by setting the visibility on each one.

Tags

What are tags? They're simply topics or labels chosen by you--and other FoodAnswersOnline members--for any webpages (or PDF, PowerPoint or MP3 files), which can help you find those pages again later on. There is no limit on how many you can use so you can assign as many to each page as you think will be helpful. Each tag can be one word or several so there's no need to push words together as you may have seen on other services. Tags also group related URLs together so creating them as a hierarchy enables FoodAnswersOnline to gather related URLs to enhance their searchability.

There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved FoodAnswersOnline choices; in fact, that would defeat the basic value of our service. You can use words, phrases, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements

What are the rules for tag names?

A tag can be alpha, numeric or alphanumeric. It can also contain any special character except underscore.

Note: Tag names are always converted to all lowercase so Tag1, TAG1 and tag1 are the same. Also, even though you can put more than one space character in a tag name only one space is save: sp   ace is the same as sp ace.

What makes a good tag?

A good tag expresses one, and only one, concept or attribute and is meaningful for you and your community or work group. Beyond tags that capture basic categorization, like location or type of business or activity, quality or other arbitrary value and quantity can be very helpful. A favorite bike trail in Marin County might have tags bike trail (what is it) and Marin County (where is it) but adding favorite as well can be very helpful when planning a ride with friends who're using FoodAnswersOnline before talking with you.

• One idea:

  The most important ingredient in a good tag is that it captures one, and only one, concept or attribute. For instance, looking at a restaurant webpage such as Nemo Restaurant you might consider creating a tag 'restaurants Miami' but this would fuse two ideas together and so instead we recommend you use two tags, restaurants and Miami. Since Nemo describes its cuisine as New American you can add that as a third tag and down the road you can find it through any one of the three.

• Your words:

  The second major quality of a good tag is that it's meaningful for you and your community or work group. For example when discussing the latest hot restaurants or clubs some people use the word trendy while others say hip; in your directory use the one that best fits your style.

• Quality:

  Further, good tags are useful in helping you remember what you thought about a restaurant, CD or biking trail. So tags like good and bad, long and short, fancy and simple are often appropriate. Two or three years from now, if someone asks you for a fancy restaurant in Miami, just search your directory and see how Nemo Restaurant shows up!

• Quantity:

  In this same sense, consider using descriptive words as tags rather than quantities. For example, instead of making a set of tags to describe the length of hiking trails such as "< 2 miles, 2-5 miles, 6-10 miles and > 10 miles" you might want to use "short, medium and long." This is particularly useful when the range of values is really big, such as prices of TVs, PCs and digital cameras but don't hesitate to be as specific as needed for your purpose.

What doesn't make a good tag?

In addition to capturing the concepts you think of when looking at a web page, you may think of adding tags that would be selected by other people. For example, the words movie, film and cinema have very similar meanings yet on close examination have somewhat different connotations and so are used by different groups of people. Trying to force these words to have exactly the same meaning in FoodAnswersOnline instead collapses the different groups into one and lowers the actual information value of the tags.

Spending too much time puzzling out the perfect tags for a set of pages doesn't really help either. Using FoodAnswersOnline is a way to make your time on the web more productive and if a particular word or phrase was what you thought of when considering how to include the page in your directory, odds are that you'll have the same words come to mind when you search for it later.