When I posted yesterday about my problem with Thunderbird and its possible solution, I did so in part because I wanted to make it findable by others with the same problem. So, I did the most basic search-engine optimization stuff of making sure I used some words and tags people are likely to search for. Then, yesterday afternoon I was part of a brief conversation with Andy Oram in which he talked about his interest in the phenomenon of bottom-up tech support. Googling for solutions to problems works but only sort of, says Andy. And that got me thinking that it’d be useful if we started tagging such posts with some standard tags, such as (perhaps): troubleshooting, operating system, application name, error message, problem area, solved/unsolved. So, my post on Thunderbird would be tagged: troubleshooting, xp, thunderbird, “rebuilding index”, folders, solved. Something like that.

In fact, perhaps we could use a microformat for technical problems and solutions. [Tags: microformats troubleshooting andy_oram everything_is_miscellaneous]