blech:

Whenever I have a tag field, I use it, and I try to be consistent. So Tumblr finally having some sort of global support for tagging is nice. Because I was away today, I first noticed it when looking at other people’s posts on my dashboard (although this example is one of my own):

My first thought was “why the fuck are they using a hash in front of the tag? This isn’t bloody Twitter; Tumblr have more sense than to force metadata into the body of a message (well, except for all the post types that don’t have titles, but that’s another matter)”.

My second thought was to try clicking on the links, and it turns out that despite the post (which I eventually got to after wading through some Facebook nonsense and promotional rubbish) claiming that tags are normalised, they’re not. Or maybe they are, but not all tags. In any case, the ‘victoria line” tag page is coming up empty.

Still, one hurrah for highlighting tags, a half hurrah for a global tag search (that sort of works), and a big fat raspberry for pointlessly aping Twitter’s use of # to indicate a tag when there’s no bloody need to.

I was pretty excited to see Tag Channels today.  I’d was just NEEDING them yesterday, and wasted quite a lot of time researching to find out that you CAN’T do tag channels — well until today.  So this is overall great news to me.

As for the HashTag approach (which originated with IRC), I suspect the reasoning is to emphasize that on Tumblr, these are not “ordinary” tags just for filtering your own posts, as on every other blog.  It’s a different thing happening, that’s pretty cool, and imagine they hope will completely change the way people interact on Tumblr.

That said, is there still a way to filter my own content with tags?  Do I make a tag without the hash?  Maybe that’s the difference?