In the modern web it
is very important that your project consider branding in the form of a unique
acronym (or in web parlance, a 'tag' or 'keyword'). In fact, once you
have decided on what the project is going to try and achieve (after the initial brainstorm), the next thing the project should do is decide on a clever
acronym. Coincidentally, this usually tends to be one of the more
enjoyable aspects of the project as it utilises that puzzle part of your brain.
Just remember not to spend too much time trying to decide on which
acronym, and once you do decide your acronym, remember that it CAN NOT CHANGE. Otherwise,
see below for a quick couple of tests you can do below to check to see your
acronym is a good one that will help your project be found on the Web.
Why should you create a project acronym / tag?
Imagine you are half way
through your project and giving a presentation at a conference. You come to the
final slide and provide a link to your project page. The people watching
quickly try and scribble down the URL. These same people go home and one
day, several weeks later, they are reminded of your project and want to look it
up, however they can't seem to find the URL that you provided. The
solution: a clever, memorable acronym (ideally with an
accompanying image or icon) can make all the difference, as instead of a person
having to remember a URL, they are able to just go to Google and type in the
acronym / tag from memory and quickly find your project.
HOW
DO I CREATE A GOOD 'PROJECT ACRONYM' AKA “UNIQUE TAG” – STEP BY STEP
So you probably know
what a tag is but what is a “unique” tag? Below you’ll find a quick guide on
how to create a unique tag, or at least a unique-ish tag:
- (1) Come up with some ideas for
a tag. Usually people try and come up with a clever acronym based on their
projects description. Some requirements for a unique tag:
§ Your tag should be
6-12 characters in length and contain only letters (A-Z) and numbers (0-9),
e.g. “fedorazon”
§ The tag should be a
single “word”, no spaces should be in the tag. Though you are welcome to
compound words into a single word, e.g. “crm4uni”
§ No special characters
should be included in the tag, i.e. no dashes (-), underscores (_), full stops
/ periods (.), commas (,) or any other character you’d have to press in
combination with the “shift” key on your keyboard to create. Just stick
with single “word” combinations of A-Z and 0-9.
- (2) Once you have some ideas
for a tag, check your tag by going to Google, Bing and Yahoo search
engines and typing it in.
If no more than a hundred or so pages come up with that combination
of letters and numbers you most likely have a good unique-ish tag.
- Please note: To have
zero hits back from a search engine is obviously a truly unique tag,
though we recognise this is not easy to achieve. Ideally you want a
tag that is unique but also human readable, so make sure it is easy to
say out loud, as in “My project is “Shuffl” spelled with two “F’s” just
look it up on Google you’ll find it”.
- (3) Make sure the world knows
what your tag means. Provide
a page on the web with a matching URL describing what the tag means, for
example ANDS uses the tag #andsApps to tag anything related to the
programme of work relates to those collection of project.
- Also, make sure your
ANDS-Liaison is aware of your tag. Why? – because ANDS will look to
archive your project and collect all the info about your project
(including Web content, emails and reports).
- A unique tag makes the initial
archive collection process much easier for us (as well as you and other
organisation like the Internet Archive who will preserve your blog in the
long term).
- (4) Once you have a tag, use it
everywhere (see
ideas below) – not only because it will make it easier to find stuff but
because it will help increase your search engine optimation aka
“GoogleJuice”. Though for that to happen you must make sure to pass
your tag out so people will click on it lots (perhaps get some business
cards with the tag on it)!
§ Use your tag on Web 2
Tools like: Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, Twitter (via hash symbol “#”,
Technorati and (last but not least) delicious.
§ Use your tag with your
code repository like: GoogleCode, GitHub, Sourceforge, Bitbucket, etc.
§ Use your tag on word
documents (2007/10) when you save the document there are boxes for both
‘author’ and ‘tags’ prior to clicking ’save’
§ Use your tag in the
subject heading of all emails to your ANDS-Liase, this is especially helpful so
your programme manager can keep track of correspodance with the various project
participants.
- (5) ONCE YOU HAVE DECIDED ON A
TAG DON’T CHANGE IT. This
is essential as if you change your tag half way through your project then
you will lose all of the aggregation the benefits stated above.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)
·
§ Q: When should
I create a tag?
§ A: Ideally you should
create a tag during bid writing stage (or even earlier if you are building on
an idea <- never hurts to tag up an idea at a Eureka moment for your own
notes).
§ Most importantly for a
project you should make sure that everyone knows the tag and agrees that it is
a single unique tag. The team should be refering to the project via that
tag prior to the bid being submitted and should not change once the bid is
funded.
§ Q: Won’t this
tag get lost as more tags are added to the internet?
§ A: Potentially yes,
but ideally we will have archived your content into our archive before that
happens so that the data will be a coherent collection that others will be able
to use in the future.
§ Q: Why is a
tag for every project important to ANDS?
§ A: By all projects
having a tag we are able to start doing more quantitative analysis of data, for
example text mining on various collections of projects. If we fund
several technical projects we can text mine the data produced by those projects
to get an idea of what technologies are being regularly used or what is cutting
edge. This helps inform us on what kind of training events we should be
putting on or what new innovation spaces we should be exploring.
§ Q: In twitter I use the hash or pound symbol (#) to tag tweets - do I always
have to use the “#” symbol with my tag?
§ A: No you do not need
to use the hash symbol for other tagging tools. For Twitter it is
a good idea as it also enables you to set up a twitter archive (see Google)
where you can then have your tweets saved beyond the two weeks that twitter
keeps tweets!
§ Q: What if the
online Web application I am using doesn’t have a tagging system, how can I tag
content?
§ A: You can set up a
delicious account which enables you to tag any page with a URL of it’s own.
§ Q: What if I
am confused and don’t understand tags?
§ A: Contact your ANDS
liaison who is just a phone call away
§ Q [1] = A tag is
basically a keyword you assign to help classify the information you create on
the Web. This article helps somewhat, though we use a more lossy
definition of tags, see Q&A above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)
