Tagging is all the rage. Flickr started it, really, with their photo tags, and various other data providers have taken the idea and run with it. For those of you who haven’t come across tagging, Flickr’s the best example of how it works: when you upload a photo, you include a number of keywords that apply to the image. Say I upload a picture of a friend at Uni; I might include the keywords “uni campus brisbane portrait”. People can then go visit a page for each tag, and see every photo uploaded to Flickr with that tag. It’s a great way of making sure your photos get categorised with everyone else’s, and it’s also a great way to find a whole lot of photos on one basic theme; as Flickr puts it, “Tags help you find photos which have something in common”.

Technorati took this idea and ran with it. Technorati tags are incredibly powerful – you put a technorati tag on a webpage, including a link back to Technorati’s tag page, and the tag page presents links to everyone who tagged their webpages with the same tag. This is particularly useful for blogging, as you can tag each entry based on its content (yes, that’s those links at the bottom of my entries), but you can do it for any page. Want to read what bloggers were saying about, say, the Oscars? Just go to the Technorati tag page for the Oscars and you’ll see links to… 95 entries from 34 blogs, as of this post.

As a blogger, tags also help you direct your traffic. If you’re blogging about popular topics, include a tag with that topic – it helps other people find what you’re saying. (Unsurprisingly, the porn tag generates quite a bit of traffic.) I get a reasonable amount of traffic from my tags whenever I talk about Apple products, especially the iPod, as Apple seems to have surreptitiously taken over the blogosphere. Tagging’s not shameless link-whoring, though – if you tag properly, you’re just making sure that people have access to the information you provide. Also note that if you use your blog software’s Categories to sort your entries, the categories automatically count as tags. I use specific tags as well, though, as my categories are pretty broad.

Okay, that went longer than I expected. This was just supposed to be an intro to give some context for the rest of the post, but I’ll do the rest in another post shortly. Hopefully this was enlightening for at least some of you :)

Heck, since this is turning into a tutorial, here’s two more useful points. First, you can use Technorati Tags in LiveJournal posts just as easily as you can anywhere else. Obviously, a lot of daily “here’s my life!” livejournalling isn’t worth tagging (which is not to say it’s not worth writing or sharing!) – but I can think of quite a lot of my LiveJournal friends who should certainly be using technorati tags on their more content-heavy entries.

Secondly, you want to put Technorati Tags in your posts? Here’s the format:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/<font color="#ff0000">$tagname</font>" rel="tag"><font color="#ff0000">$tagname</font></a>

If you want to include spaces, put in plus signs (like “world+of+warcraft”). The power of tagging is that it’s infinitely categorisable, because you can pick any tag names you like; it’s consensus-driven in that the more popular tags get higher prominence on Technorati’s index pages.

If you can’t be bothered with writing out all that code for the tags every time you post – and who can? – there are plugins for many popular blog engines that will do it for you. I haven’t had much luck with the one for WordPress, and I have a better solution for you anyway. Matt at Oddiophile has written a bookmarklet to generate the code automatically. Just pop it in your bookmark toolbar, and when you use it it pops up a window – enter the tags you want, hit enter, it gives you the code. Copy that, paste into blog entry. Super-duper easy, and it works for LiveJournal just as well as it works for blogs or anything else.

Technorati Tags: blogging, tagging, tags, technorati, flickr, www

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 19th, 2005 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Tech Chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.