Tagged on Five Things, Plus More Tag Talk

Okay, I don't do these very often, but Journals Product Manager Stephanie tagged me in her blog entry, and you want to keep your Product Manager happy, so here goes: My contribution to the The "Five Things Your Don't Know About Me" meme. (A meme is an idea that spreads, as if it has a life of its own.)

I'm going to discuss the other kind of tagging, too, but first, the five things, so I don't get the meme police called on me and I get beat up by some 15-year-old girl (as Stephanie suggested might happen):

Five Things You Don't Know About Me:

1. Those LED pedestrian crossing signals? I have one in my house. Got it from an online surplus place:
   
   
   


2. I've been eating a lot of tater tots lately. It just kind of happened.


3. The first CD I ever bought? The Soundtrack From Twin Peaks. It came in a cardboard longbox. (Remember how those were going to destroy the environment?) I didn't even have a CD player at the time.


4. I have a black thumb -- every plant I've ever owned has died in brutal fashion, most quickly, though some have died slow, lingering deaths.


5. I used to be able to drive a manual shift. I can't any more.

I think that technically fulfills the requirements of the meme. Oh, I have to tag 5 other people: I tag Susie, Corey, the folks at AIM BuddyBlog, David and the AOL Photo Team. Come play and/or suffer with the rest of us.

Now, about the other kind of tagging, the ability to tag entries that went live with R10.

The How: See my previous entry, which is in major need of revision, yet still tells you the basic mechanics on how to tag your entries.

The Why: Why tag your entries? This "Five Things" meme is a perfect example. By tagging my entry with a specific tag (say "five things" or "five things meme"), I associate that label with this entry. That means, in this particular case, the tag will say to blog search engine Technorati -- "Hey, this here entry is about something called "five things""

Then, when you do a tag search (which also happens when you click on the tag), it will show you other blog entries that have also been tagged "five things."

You can pick tags that are really common so that your stuff will show up when other people do general blog searches (like pets, dogs, funny), or you can use really specific tags that will probably only be used by you or your friends (six-pack picks).

Here's another example. Over in my AIM Pages Team blog, I participated in Day of the Ninja, which was Dec. 5:

The folks who created Day of the Ninja asked that folks who participated in the fun tag their blog entries, photos, videos, etc. with the tag "ninjaday2006", so that people could easily find other people who did silly ninja things.

These are just some examples of how you can use tagging. On the flip side, there are also different ways to expose tags. For example, like many other sites that use tags, AOL Pictures has a Tag Cloud that shows some of the more popular tags being used by AOL Pictures users (the bigger the word, the more popular the tag):

Each one of those words is a clickable hyperlink; clicking a link will show you photos that use that tag.

Anyway, play around and come up with your own uses for tags. The thing about tags is that as long as they work they way you want them to work, there's really no wrong way to use them.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: five things, five things meme, aol journals, tagging, journals r10, meme police