Label sprawl

I have it bad. Really bad. And I'm not the only one.

This blog suffers from "Label Sprawl': a distressing and delibilitating malady that affects just about anything that can be labeled, tagged, marked up, assigned, or named with metadata - that stuff that means 'information about this item'. The evidence is incontrovertible (which I always think of as being like a car that has a roof that can be folded away, except that in this case, it can't be folded away...) and is off the the right, physically rather than politically. in the 'Labels' section, there are too many labels. Note that I don't say lots of labels. Too many labels.

Labels seem like a good idea. They allow you to find things that are related, just so long as they have the same label. If they don't have the same label, then they may not be related. Of course, it could just be the labeling that is faulty. So perhaps if you can't find something then it is just 'poor quality labelling' that is the problem.

But sprawl is different. It isn't that the items are poorly labelled: in fact, high quality labelling seems to make it worse, because the more labels you add, and the more precise and detailed you are with the labels, the more there are, and the worse the sprawl becomes. This blog is a good example: plenty of carefully thought-out labels, hand-picked by trained acolytes, polished and placed in just the right place with accuracy and precision, but with just one problem. There are too many of them. They obscure the information in a plethora of detail.

Information overload = Label sprawl?

I'll admit, I was expecting that at this point, the blog software would suddenly pop up and say: 'You seem to have a problem with Label Sprawl. Do you want to do nothing about it, but to waste lots of time in the process?' But maybe that's a different expectation to do with paper clips... Or else, there aren't quite enough labels yet, and all that I need to do to activate the automatic label organiser is just to add a few more labels...