My rule is backlink for anything I want to annotate or write about, tag for everything else (actions to take, classification/filter tool).
I like @dmc’s idea about a single term having the capacity to be a concept and tag. I see using [[Microsoft]] as a page catchall for stuff I need to annotate and write about, as opposed to #microsoft being pegged to the company mentioned in the context of something which is not fundamentally important.
Tags now to me seems to be a second level citizen in Obsidian: for local graph of a note, notes with the same tag will not be shown with whatever depth you have set.
Interesting point! Never thought of that.
Now that you point out that discrepancy between tags and links, I may experiment with using links instead of tags in situations where I want that local graph behavior that tags don’t provide.
What I mean is assuming you are linking bidirectionally or at least to [[NoteActingAsTag]] from relevant notes, you could search for something like:
[[NoteActingAsTag]] AND [[AnotherNoteAsTag]]
and you will get the same tag functionality explained above…
“A tag of ssl will find many notes. A tag of aws will also find many notes. But ssl and aws will only find the notes where I’ve configured SSL on AWS resources.”
However, although I can’t vouch that it is a huge difference, according to the current online help document it will not be as fast of a search:
tag: will search for your specified tag within a file, for example tag:#work. This is faster and more accurate than searching for the tag in plaintext #work, as it uses the cached information and ignores text in code blocks and sections that aren’t markdown text.
My apologies if anything I shared here is incorrect, but I know I used to use a similar method to this before my workflow drastically changed.
Thanks for the heads up.
As Obsidian improves, I am altering the methods I use to appropriately access the information and ideas in my documents.
With tags, the recent addition I am appreciative of is the nested tags feature. At first, I didn’t see how I could use them to improve my process. Now, I use them everyday. Here is an updated example, to my last post, of how I use tags, compared to links:
The tag I use is: To/Read/Recommended
The link I use is: [[Recommended Books#To Read]]
Once I read a recommended book, and decide I want to start note-taking, I will then transition that book from a TBR tag to a TBR link. My goal is to eventually have zero tags in my tag pane.
Here it is, in practice, with a recommended author I am currently exploring:
20210126084613 North with the Spring, which is the current timestamp and the name of the bookTags: To/Read/Recommended in the front matter of that inbox note, add in my workflow tags and quick contextual notes, and then archive the fileTo/Read/Recommended tag, in the tag pane, retrieve the 20210126084613 North with the Spring file from my inbox archive, and then read the book20210126084613 North with the Spring, update it with new workflow tags and the new location, erase Tags: To/Read/Recommended, and archive the file againNorth with the Spring (1951), and then place a link to that page under the heading [[Recommended Books#To Read]]
The distinction here is that books that get a TBR link will be reread and further examined. These books will remain in my vault, whereas books that get a TBR tag may not get read, at all, and just deleted as I work through my tag listings.
Okay, so that post turned out to be more involved than I intended. I’ve benefitted from the information other Obsidian users have shared, so hopefully this post will be of benefit to someone else.
@dmc Though I use tags in a completely different way, I am currently also considering the option of using nested tags - still haven’t come to a conclusion yet if they would rather structure or hinder my workflow; thus, I was curious reading your practice example. However, to be honest, I haven’t understood yet how nested tags help you with that. Maybe I didn’t get your point exactly - but how does it make a difference for your described workflow if you use a nested tag like #To/Read/Recommended or just a single tag like #ToRead or #Recommended-book?
This occurred to me today, and it’s suddenly put it all in place:
#recommended, then you only get the tags. But it helps me to think of the question “Do I want this to be a tag rather than a bidirectionally linked word/phrase?” as equivalent to the question: “Do I want to be able to quickly see the search results for this?”I use a #howto tag and then add a separate #cook or #paint or #photography tags.
How do you tell literature and evergreen notes apart in the graph?
So your experience is that it’s beneficial not to try do decide on a clearly defined set of topic tags, but rather add whatever tags seems most fitting in the moment. Going for a more “impulsive” decision is what eventually give the Zettelkasten its voice to talk back to you?
Basically, this is my experience so far, yes. Because it prevents you to stay trapped in your predefined categories of thinking (that would be somehow the same as using folders, where you have to decide from the beginning what is the one topic this note belongs to; direct links - though of course I use them too - actually have the same effect: you have to decide from the beginning where this story might end up!) and makes it possible to discover relations you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
Most of my productive writing results from using tags in this way.
Thanks! I’ve lately felt some frustration over how I use tags, feeling that I use synonyms too often as one example. Before I stumbled on this tread, my plan was to try to define a fixed set of tags and just use them.
But the discussion here makes it obvious that a combination of clearly defined relationships (that is links between pages) and more vague (tags) is probably best for serendipity when using the Zettelkasten during output.
The links might then function as bridges between different thought patterns in the form of tag clusters.
This is why I’ve been trying to start a conversation about implementing a toggle feature that would allow nested tags to be viewed in the graph as orthogonal trees - around which notes are clumped. I believe this can help us get a clearer visualisation of note structuring.
From what I’ve understood, nested tags are uni-directional, while note linkages are bi-directional. I think, having the above-mentioned scheme could enable to spot hierarchies that we personally default to.
I noticed there are two main practices on using the tags: for holding meta-data, or for list topics/keywords.
The way tags are displayed in graph view make them not well-suited for holding meta-data of notes – the point of graph view is to show the connection of concepts/notes, yet their location in the YAML header makes them meta-data de facto. Add to that, a word prefixed with # makes it automatically a tag. I felt it would great if there is another category, say meta to hold the meta-data, while leaving tags and # for topics.
That is where dataview plugin comes in because dataview is able to search through the meta, but no graph views. I use type for my meta, such as todo, place, event, term, etc. tags are for topics for me.
As to tags vs links, tags for things that I don’t intend to create a page for and links for things that I intend to create a page for.
I loved when you said:
Storing information or even knowledge is the easy part. Retrieving it is a fine art.
I’ve read this thread twice already, top to bottom, and I still can’t figure out this dilemma for myself.
I use tags as status/type indicators and everything else gets a link. I find it easier to build out a bigger note when I have it as a link/page once it gets enough other things linking to it that I want to develop the idea.
I call them Tagnotes and I talked about and demonstrated how I do it here: Obsidian Tagnotes - YouTube
I feel this
In some in-deep Zettlekasten studies, someone talks about “weak” and “strong” linking.
For example, if I write a zettle about the “Show don’t tell” method, I could link this article to the “Save the cat” method as their both anglosaxon method to construct a writing piece. It is a strong link, as I contextualise them into the article and they are directly related. I can also link the article to a extract from a book as a good example of “Show don’t tell” or my own analysis of a film. This process mimics the way your brain functions, creating associations between ideas to create new ideas.
But tags are different, as you can find yourself linking things together without context and evident relationship. For example, I can set a tag “Medical advise” with an article about healing a stomach pain and an other one about when consulting a physician for a headache is a good idea. They are not directly related even if they take place in the same field. But methods, causes and consequences are not the same at all.
When you study something, the ideal configuration is the one that requires you the less efforts as you need to concentrate a lot to gather and incorporate new knowledges. Direct linkings allow you to constantly call back what you learnd before. Tags allows you to create categories. Do you need categories ? To do what ?
Myself I don’t use them at all. I use to, because this feature is rather a convention, but I don’t need them anymore. For example I set up the tag “medicine advise” in the title with my file naming process : medecine notes begins with a number “013” and advise becomes “013.02.Headache.When call the doctor.Advice”. When I type “013.Advise” in my quick switcher, the research tools find for me every files from medecine with “advise” in their title. The page "“013.02.Headache.When call the doctor.Advice” is linked to the “013.02.Headache.Possible causes”.
I hope you find this usefull 
During organizing existing documents without a good structure yet for MOCs, I find it useful to begin with tagging, then migrate to pages. I just released Tag Wrangler 0.5.0 with the ability to create Tag Pages so that one can convert a tag to a hybrid tag/page, and migrate tags to links via the “unlinked mentions”.
At some point, I may add a function for automated conversion in one direction or both to the plugin, but at least at the moment it gives you some maneuvering room between the two, without needing to decide once and for all that you’re using tags or links: tag pages let both co-exist at the same time for a given topic or state. And they’re especially useful for dataviews on state tags, as you can hover-preview them from the tag pane.
In a way, tag pages give you a privileged set of pages that can be readily accessed from a sidebar pane, which can make it easier to do hierarchical organization similar to Dendron – i.e. you can make a hierarchy of concepts in tags and link them to pages, even without the pages themselves needing to be named that way or in a folder hierarchy.