Midway through last week, I decided to clean up my del.icio.us account. I’ve been using del.icio.us pretty faithfully for over two years and was somewhat shocked to see that I’d amassed over 1,400 links and upwards of 400 tags.

Since I’ve always shared my links publicly, I’d always over-tag any link I posted. I’d tag something with every single descriptor I could come up with as well as using both the singular and plural versions of words. This is all fine and good, since that helps spread the link out and make it possibly easier to find for someone searching del.icio.us tags, but for me, it was a big mess.

So, I decided to bite the bed-rail and clean that shit up. I’ve started bundling tags, looking for and deleting misspellings and combining plural and singular tag words. I’m also trying to simplify my tagging, using only descriptors that I would actually use in a search and combining definition variations to a single, preferred tag. For example, the tags “crypto, cryptography, secret, secret-code, private, crypt, cipher” can be glommed under just “cryptography“.

It’s a pretty crazy amount of cleaning. After a few days of picking away at this in my spare moments, I’ve managed to slim down to 1,190 links and I’m guessing somewhere around 300 or so tags. I still have a ton of links to clean out—all crap I linked a long time ago that’s either dead or completely irrelevant to what I’m doing now.

A service to validate or report broken links in a del.icio.us would rule right now.