I’ve never been very disciplined about tagging notes or documents. But as I’m working on improving my zettelkasten knowledge base I decided to give tagging another go.
So I quickly came up with a list of logical keywords and added an octothorp (#) to make them into hashtags because…why not? Every major social media platform uses hashtags these days.
And then I converted all my notes to markdown to make formatting easier and more consistent.
If you’re at all familiar with markdown you can see where this is going. Suddenly all my HASHTAGS WERE GINORMOUS H1 HEADERS.
And that’s how I learned to use backslash #hashtag to format anything with a leading #. The backslash escapes the hashtag symbol, allowing it to publish as a number sign.
Another Reason Hashtagging Isn’t a Great Idea for Research Notes
There’s another reason to avoid using a hashtag for tagging your research notes. Depending on the app you are using to search your notes, you might not get any benefit from the hashmark at all.
In DevonThink Pro a search on #books returns documents that include “that’s one for the record books” and “he cooked the books” as well as articles about #books that I tagged because I might want to read them. DevonThink apparently treats the # as a misplaced search operator and ignores it.
Gabe Weatherhead uses a convention of doubling the first letter of a word that he wants to use as a tag. Our gestalt-y brains can easily read “ppeople” as “people”. Weatherhead got the idea from Merlin Mann who adds an “x” on the end of his tag keywords.
I’ve switched to using a convention of tg-keyword because ddouble lettering words makes me a little queasy, like a Bill Barminski portrait.
Having a unique word form for your tags makes the search more reliable no matter what platform you are on. The only downside that I can see is that if you’re invested on your collection of tag keywords you will have to convert them to plain words or hashtags to use them on a specific platform like WordPress or Twitter.
Nothing’s perfect. sigh
