Tagging best practices?

Question

Is it better to use cojoined words (socialweb), dashes (social-web) or spaces ("social web")

I would like to conform to the most accepted sytax of tagging, in order to improve findability.

if possible, please cite authoritative resources

@john - thank you.
I'm familiar with the sources you've mentioned, bu didn't find my answer there.
I'm tagging my blogposts and my diigo.com highlights and bookmarks.
I would like to use the most popular form, so that others can benefit from my research.
how do I know what is the *popular* way of tagging? generally and specific terms ?

for your referance, my blog's at:
http://eyalnow.wordpress.com
and my shared diigo bookmarks at:
http://www.diigo.com/user/eyalnow

thanks !

Answer 1

If you are talking about user generated collaborative tagging or social bookmarking, there really are not standards to compound words. The user gets to define them. One disadvantage of this is just as you say, no standards.

Most tagging implementations I've used don't allow spaces in the tag. I have mostly seen and used conjoined words.

If you want to implement your own recommendations or best practices, feel free. If you are concerned about standardizing tags a taxonomy with a controlled vocabulary may be important. This takes more administrative work than letting the users do it with a folksonomy, however.

Answer 2

What way you pick to tag depends on whether you are mostly interested in finding just your own saved items, or whether you are more likely to want to find items others saved as well.
For example, if you tag your items with the word management, and do it that way consistently, you will readily find your items. If, however, most other people use the abbreviation mgmt, their items will not appear in your search.
It is not possible to avoid all mismatches. For instance, people saving the same travel site might choose the tag from among world, global, or international.
Cojoined words are the simplest version among the possibilities you raised.