You may or may not have noticed that I did a ridiculous amount of tag / award posts last week.  Seven of them, to be exact.  One every day of the week.  I know there are other blogs that do a ton of tags, but it is a bit out of the norm for me.

I noticed lately that I was falling behind on my tags.  I was getting tagged faster then I was posting tags!  It was stressing me out being behind, so I decided to do a big push and get them all done!

• Monday – Inside My Head Tag
• Tuesday – Sunshine Blogger Award #5
• Wednesday – The Unique Blogger Award
• Thursday – I MESSED UP … BOOK TAG
• Friday – One Lovely Blog Award
• Saturday – THE ENTERTAINER BLOGGER AWARD
• Sunday – The Mid Year Freak Out Book Tag

Doing all of these tags got me thinking about tagging etiquette.

I have a huge fear of accidentally doing something wrong.  Of accidentally stepping over some invisible line I didn’t know about.  When I first started blogging I stayed away from tags because I didn’t know where the lines were.  It took me a while to figure out how they worked.

Luckily, the book blogging community is amazing and I was able to figure it out pretty quickly.  Plus there aren’t a lot of strict rules about tagging.  Its meant to be fun and everyone is super relaxed about them.

Here are some of the questions that ran through my head at one point:

Do you have to do a tag if someone tagged you?

No! I always mention that whoever I tag shouldn’t feel obligated to participate.  Its meant to be fun and if they don’t want to do it, I don’t want them to feel pressured!!

But on the flip side I try to do every single tag I have been tagged in! I *think* I have done them all, but I am not very organized and its possible I missed some!

Do you have to tag the “required” number of bloggers?

A lot of tags have “rules” outlining what is required to participate.  One of these rules is usually how many people you have to tag.  I am not particularly fond of this rule because a lot of them want you to tag 10 or more people! That is a lot of blogs! I get why the creator added that rule, but I don’t want to bug people by tagging them all the time.

My rule of thumb is that if I was tagged then I should tag someone.  If I was just doing the tag randomly without being tagged then I don’t tag anyone.  I also usually tag 3 people even if the rule says to tag more.  Three seems to be a good number.

Does it annoy people to be tagged?

I can’t answer this one.

Personally I love being tagged, it makes me feel special. (but I have a feeling my opinion will change if I keep getting tagged a ton)  But I know not everyone will feel that way.  And I don’t want to tag the same people over and over again.  Where is the line of being fun and being annoying?  (Help me!)

In order to keep from bugging people I decided I wouldn’t tag anyone more than once. I have a list I use to keep track of who I have tagged and I have tagged 107 different blogs to date.

But this isn’t going to work forever, and there are so many issues with my solution:

1. I will eventually run out of Blogs to tag
2. What if someone wants to be tagged?
3. If its been a year since I tagged them can I tag them again?
4. Do they want to be tagged again?
5. Do they feel left out if they notice I haven’t tagged them in forever?
6. Do people even keep track of that?
7. But will they get annoyed if I tag them again?

I have a problem with over thinking things.

Anyway,  I still don’t know the best way to go about this.   I think I am going to re-start my list soon, but we will see.

Should I ping-back to the person that tagged me?

Yes! I love seeing when people participate after I tagged them.  If the person tagging you doesn’t want you to link to them then they shouldn’t have tagged you!

Should I ping-back to the creator?

Yes, I would think they want to see the fruits of their labor!

What is a ping-back?

Most of you probably already know this, but it took me a long time to figure it out so I wanted to include it in case someone didn’t know.

When someone includes a link to one of your posts it pings-back and lets you know.  That way you can go see their post that links to you.

But they only work if you ping-back to a specific post.  For example if you just link to “perfectlytolerable.com” I won’t get a notification but if you link to ” ” I will!

Do I have to comment on someone’s blog to let them know I tagged them?

You probably should but I don’t.  I feel weird saying “oh by the way I tagged you”

Instead, I use ping-backs and just hope they accept it. (Don’t forget to ping-back to an actual post!)

When I use ping-backs I make sure to pick an appropriate post to link too.  A book review, meme or another tag works well.  Someone once tagged me via ping-back to the post about my Grandpa passing away.  I thought that was incredibly rude and thoughtless! Don’t be that person!

What are your thoughts?

Particularly I am interested in knowing how you choose who to tag and if you get annoyed by people tagging you!  But let me know any thoughts you have about tagging!!!