I caught the attention of a couple of people with my tagging idea. I am hoping I can pull in some more folks.
In this post, I want to talk about how bloggers can add tags to their entries.
Technorati is currently the only search engine that captures and catalogs tags. You can look at their main tag page to see the popular tags. The page says they are currently tracking 388,047 tags.
To allow Technorati to see your tags, you add a hyperlink that points back to Technorati. Let's say you have written a a great post on a business book you have just got done reading. Write the post like you normal would and add this piece of html to the end of the entry.
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/businessbooks" rel="tag">businessbooks</a>
This link will end up looking like this:
businessbooks
That is it.
If you want to watch the entries that get added, you can follow save the http://www.technorati.com/tag/businessbooks page as a bookmark. You can set-up a watchlist in Technorati with the search term "tag:businessbooks". The watchlist let's you create an RSS feed and you are notified automatically when new things are added to that page.
Make sense? Post questions if you have them.
In my next post, I am going to talk about how anyone can use tags to help others find good stuff.
Posted by Todd S. at March 3, 2005 07:50 AM | TrackBack
I had a similar post here: http://users.tns.net/~skingery/weblog/2005/02/joho-blog-tags-labels-and-piles-of.html. Tag everything. It's like searching only different. The intersection of tags can bring new discoveries. Also, something cool, is del.icio.us. If you go to http://del.icio.us/tag/businessbooks you'll find out what people are linking to as well.
Posted by: Scott Kingery at March 3, 2005 05:21 PMI think they will.
They give users a way to categorize content.
The user part is really important. Google is just code. Tags let users designate what is interesting.
The categorize part is also really important. There are some things that are just too general to find. Tags let you specifically attach a meaning to a piece of data.
In the case of business books, it is a way for a community to use established tools to point things out to each other. We try to point people to other interesting things as much as we can, but we are limited by time. With enough interest, time is not really a constraint and the best stuff bubbles to the top.
It is going to take another six to twelve months before it is big. There needs to be some other mainstream applications to tagging (i.e. iPhoto needs to do what Flickr lets you do) and then people will start to get it.
Posted by: Todd at March 5, 2005 10:28 AM