LiveJournal, one of the web’s biggest blogging/journalling hubs, has just – finally – introduced tagging. This is something for which many LiveJournal users have been waiting for a long time, myself among them.

Now, however, there’s something of a dilemma. Using LiveJournal tags provides one with the fundamental functionality of tagging, and it will provide a quick-n-dirty way of categorising posts – a feature that’s integral to most blogging software, but sadly lacking from LiveJournal.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t directly integrate with Technorati’s tagging system, arguably the most useful public tagging protocol. Without this integration, LiveJournal’s tags are largely irrelevant in the scope of the wider web; it prevents Technorati – and other indexes using Technorati’s data – from using the massive content resources of LiveJournal in any fashion less haphazard than just ‘scrape and pray’.

What I would like to see is a LiveJournal “blogging extension”. It would be a set of customisations and tools that you’d have to switch on manually (saving the rest of the web from the vast majority of LJers who are distinctly journallers, rather than bloggers); once activated, it would allow you to send Technorati or Pingomatic pings for each journal entry, and would convert your LJ tags over to Technorati tags instead. (Or, better yet, they’d work as both.)

In the meantime, I’ll start using LiveJournal’s tags, for the categorisation if nothing else. And I’ll keep putting Technorati Tags in appropriate posts; I’ll just have to crank the font size a little lower to avoid spamming my readers with excess tags.

Hardly ideal, though. But it’s a step in the right direction, on LiveJournal’s part.

Technorati Tags: tags, blogging, livejournal, technorati

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 16th, 2005 at 4:28 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.