After a recent Twitter-related faux pas, I realized something important about tags in social media.  Tags are meaningless unless other people accept them.  Even if you’ve used a tag for years, if nobody knows about it, its usefulness is very limited.  Different groups may make different tags for the same thing, but that’s ok.  One group may be using the tag for one thing, while another may be using it for something entirely different, or even just slightly different.  Multiple tags also may exist for the very same thing.  This can be frustrating for some people (myself included) who want to  enter a single tag and find most of the information related to that tag.  Twitter and it’s 140 character limit on posts/tweets tends to encourage the use of short acronym-like hashtags.  It’s relatively easy to anticipate keyword tags, but less so for acronyms.  For this reason it’s easy to miss out on a thread because you were off by one character.  The hope is that at least one of the people you follow will be interested in the same thread and will actually use the more widely accepted tag.  Unfortunately though, in this social media universe, there’s no such thing as a correct tag.  As one of my friends used to say, “Don’t ask, just accept.” 🙂

Wow, it’s actually been over 2 months since the last time I posted here.  It’s been an insanely busy summer, but with the beginning of the Fall semester things are actually starting to calm down a bit.  Our daughter Lela is going to preschool for the first time which has allowed my wife and I to return to a normal schedule.  It’s been a little weird to be physically at work every day, but it’s been great to get back to the continuity of a regular 9-5 schedule.  Hopefully this will also allow me to give a little more attention to my blog.  (among other things)