Today begins a fairly significant experiment.

doesntgolf recently commented that he would like to be able to follow tags in a user-specifc way, regardless of whether or not that user had created a personal tag for a post. That is, he could follow #music.mk to get just my posts with the #music tag.

We thought this was a very interesting idea, and the conversations that ensued led us to this update.

Starting today, whenever you tag a post, a corresponding personal tag will be created for it. These tags can be followed or filtered just as any other tag.

Here are some details:

1. The personal tag is automatically generated based on the post's tag.

2. Posts no longer carry a normal second tag.

3. The author may now make the first community tag suggestion on their post. This replaces the second tag.

4. In your profile, you can find a link to a page with all of your personal tags.

5. If you have follower-alerts turned on, you will get emailed when someone follows one of your personal tags.

There are a number of reasons why we thought this experiment was worthwhile, and I will be happy to discuss them below. However, not all of functionality that will likely accompany this change is in place. For example, it is likely that when you visit a tag, you will also be able to see the most popular personal tags under that tag.

Of course, this is an experiment. If we find that this isn't an improvement, we will modify it, or roll things back to where we were before.

As always, feedback is much appreciated!

p.s. For previous posts, if there wasn't a community tag (which was >90% of those posts), the second tag was promoted to the community tag. However, the author of the post can still suggest a different community tag for their previous posts.

UPDATE: Based on the feedback we received here regarding the repetitiveness of the two tags, we have since formatted them in a way that combines them.