Tag: You Really Are It

In case you missed, it, check out Journals Tech Manager John's blog thoughts on private and social tagging.

If you've ever used a social sharing site like Flickr (for photos) or del.icio.us (for links), you'll know what I'm talking about: it's the ability to label content (your own or someone else's) with descriptive tags.

It's kind of a communal self-categorization system -- the current hip term to describe it is Folksonomy, which is a mashup of "folk" and "taxonomy".

It's different from a traditional taxonomy (say, the Dewey Decimal System), in that there's no one at the top of the hierarchy saying "this goes in this category and that goes there."

Instead, it's a completely open model. If you and your friends want to have a tag specifically for your photos of you wearing baseball caps inside out, you can do that. Plus, in a social tagging model, other people are free to add their own tags.

If it seems like chaos, it kind of is -- but in the weird way that these things sometimes happen, it's a useful form of chaos. Patterns emerge -- people latch on to popular tags, and conventions evolve (they're not imposed from a central authority).

Ideally, it becomes the ultimate meritocracy. Although, if you want to be cynical, maybe it just means the errors cancel out.

Tagging is useful in blog entries, too, just as with any other form of content. For example, taking Technorati as an example, say you and your friends all have blogs about underwater basketweaving. If you tag all your blog entries with "underwater basketweaving", when someone does a search on that tag, it should pull up all your tagged entries. (Right now, there aren't any entries with that tag.) It's a useful way to gather related entries, from across your blog, as well as across the entire blogosphere.

Personally, I'm probably going to be doing more self-tagging of my blog entries. For example, I can tag all of the Guest Editor's Picks entries, so that they'll come up when you search on that tag. Right now, it's all manual -- here is the HTML you'd type into your blog to do a tag on underwaterbasketweaving:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/underwaterbasketweaving" rel="tag">underwaterbasketweaving</a>

The red bolding is just to illustrate the parts you would replace to make your own tags.

We're looking into ways that we could make it easier for Journals users to tag their own stuff in a future release. This would be kind of useful, especially because the current Journals & Hometown category system -- well, it pretty much sucks.

Tagging isn't going to be the panacea to solve all of our blog search problems, but it is pretty useful.

Feel free to play around and see how you can make it work for you.

Thanks -- Joe