Tag, you're... not it at all.

Before I even begin, I need to pause and reflect on how to label this post. Though we occasionally write about music, the majority of our focus has been on visual media--comics and sci-fi movies and video games and whatnot--and the standardized tags we use reflect that. For the sake of posterity, here are all the tags we've used as of this very moment:

Action-Adventure
Alex's Nonsense
Anime and Manga
Books
Card and Board Games
Collectables
Collecting
Comics
Contests
Conventions
Costumes
Demystifying Fandoms
Election 2008
Exfanding Your Horizons
Exhibits
Fan Projects
Fantasy
Food
General Information
Guest Posts
History
Holidays
Humor
Internet
Monsters
Month in Review
Movies
Music
Obituaries
Off-Topic Discussion
Philosophy of Fandom
Politics
Puzzles and Mystery
Reviews
Roleplaying
Sci-Fi
Simulations
Sports
Stories of Fandom
Technology
Television
Video Games
Waiting for Wednesday
World Languages
Year in Review

Most of the categories are intentionally broad--my original hope was to keep the list of tags to a manageable size so that readers might actually be inclined to sift through our archives by topic. Also, there have been plenty of posts that could have had more specific labels than just "Books" or "Music," but seriously, how often were we going to write about anything horror-related?

Obviously this was before I figured out that Alex loves Halloween and vampires and zombie comics. Suddenly, the "Monsters" tag just isn't cutting it anymore.

Digging deeper, though: I'm something of a perfectionist, and if I'm going to get specific about my labeling, I want to have a tag that will stand the test of time. I don't want to have to turn around every few days to overhaul my tags because I suddenly fancy "Anime" and "Manga," respectively, instead of the combined "Anime and Manga."

And then there are times when Alex and I have two different interpretations of what a particular label means. Heck, I don't think either of us knows when to add the "Demystifying Fandoms" tag. We usually either introduce or discuss--I'll bet we confuse people more often than we demystify anything. What possible use do we have for this odd label?

Maybe I'll tag this post with "Demystifying Fandoms" and see if Alex does anything about it.

Hey, now there's an idea. Make, like, a "Bacon" tag, or something totally random that in no way, shape, or form applies to the post in question, and have that tag be some kind of code for something entirely different. For example, "Bacon" could be our tag for something we can't figure out how to classify.

Ooh, I like that.

I wonder if I can tag our tags with tags? If so, I'm totally hanging some "Bacon" off of "Demystifying Fandoms."

Just how important is properly tagging these posts? Well, this was supposed to be a discussion of the Third Eye Blind concert I just saw. When I discovered we had no tags specifically for music genres, I launched into a tangent about tagging. Therefore, I must think tagging is pretty important.

Or else I really just didn't feel like writing about the concert just yet.

I dunno--what should we do about the tags? Try to keep them down to a nice, short-ish list, like we've been doing? Classify everything a little more specifically? Be really specific and make "Madame Xanadu" and "Virsona" tags? (Honestly, we should at least do that for Mega Man and The Goon.)

Ideas, anyone?