How creative are writers - and should writers be - when it comes to putting tags on their work?
When I posted it over on Flickr, I tagged it with "sand", "beach" and "ocean".
This is, I fully accept, not terribly creative. It ignores a great many synonyms for a start - coast, sea, seaside, ocean, waves, water. And is it a bay, or is the sticky-out bit in the distance a headland? Or both? If the vegetation doesn't rate a mention because it takes up so little of the frame, how about the sky? The clouds? The footprints?
But really, I'm wondering about the less tangible descriptors. Summer. Fun. Paradise. Heat. Sunlit. Idyllic. Tropical. Relaxing. Peaceful. Tranquil.
Just to check, I bashed "tranquil" into a Creative Commons Flickr search, and came up with a weird array of stuff from temples and beaches to a pair of earrings and SecondLife screen captures.
It's all terribly subjective, too. Beaches aren't necessarily fun or peaceful. It isn't necessarily summer or hot. That particular beach is technically subtropical.
So, what do you reckon? Should we be using those less tangible tags to make our material easier to find? Or does it just clog the system up with chaos, and we should stick to the bare essentials?
Cross posted to My Open Source Life.
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