Gardner and Andy have started a movement for New Year's Resolutions about blogging more. I'm not sure I can realistically promise to blog more, but I'll try. I will, however, make this blogging-related resolution: to abide by what I'm calling the 3 Tag Rule. Here's the rule, and what it means.

Every post, on any site, gets at least 3 tags

Sounds easy enough, but wait for the second part

The three tags must be aimed toward distinct audiences

AH! That's where it gets tricky and interesting. It's easy enough to come up with two synonyms for a word. But all too often that list of synonyms slips into making sense to just one audience. For example, I tag a lot of stuff with "rdf". It's a term that only makes sense to those who already know what it means. ( It's Resource Description Framework, the semantic web core technology for how to describe things. ) And that's great if I'm only talking to people who already know what it means. But blogging should also aim toward finding new intersections between audiences. And so, for example, because rdf is useful for (among other things) cataloging stuff, I might also tag it with "cataloging" in hopes of intersecting with librarians who possibly don't know anything about the semantic web or rdf. (The particular additional tags will likely depend on the particular post.)

I hope it will be a useful mental exercise for me. I also think that it would be a useful rule for student bloggers, say the ones using umwblogs.org. It would encourage thinking about audience as part of the writing process, and especially about varieties of audiences. That's especially important when the word to live by is "interdisciplinary."