Finding Joy in Snarkville

Tagging, tracking & structured blogging:

What this session is supposed to be about:

Do taxonomies & folksonomies fill you with ennui? Charlene Li & Marnie Webb will help you discover why you care & how it gives you an edge.

Session Notes:
Please note that I am typing during this session. I expect a blanket forgiveness on any spelling, grammar, or nonsense mistakes. I may come back and clean this up and add any content in the “post production” of this entry. If I have anything to say that isn’t part of the live-blogging itself (read: my personal running commentary), I will note it by the italics.

Why are you here:

I know what tagging is, but is it worth my time? Correct form for tagging, words, sequence? Process behind it and the new tools — how it works and thought behind it? Make it more effective, easier to find me, learn about getting noticed for the RIGHT things?

What is tagging?

You’re It OR Secret Code word to ID geeks.

Truly it is a label to classify and organize things. Assigned Casually but not a taxonomy. This is personal to you and fairly freeform. This is AdHoc by nature. This is not a heirarchy. Categories are tagging — this is high level organizing. Invisible tags? Yes, you hide things in the MetaData.

Tags allow people to find things on your blog.

Tag Clouds: Alpha order and size determines popularity of the keyword. You can see this on all sorts of sites. it is more a navigation tool.

Meta Data: literally data about data. it is how other sites categorize you.

Why should you care?

Collecting and organizing your own infromation on services like del.icio.us. A way to organize links – you can quickly add tags and you can easily get 200 tags.

Also a way of finding like minded people on same topics. Questions and need an answer go to google. but want to know what people are saying about a topic — use tags, like Technorati. (encourages serendipity). Conventions for dealing about synomns. hard core answer is NO — use them all or use the most generic of the words. However, avoid phrases — use words. Some search engines are beginning to use ties to help (related).

There is much discussion about difference between keywords and tags. There doesn’t seems to be a real difference. Tagging is more social and keywords are more in isolation.

Keywords in MetaData aren’t always seen. There is a plugin for Technorati for WordPress. You may want to look for TagFetch.
Why Tag?

Add tags to make yourself discoverable. There is a way to search to by just tags, by what people think there posts are about. A way to share interests.

And you then can create an ongoing dialog with tags.

But this is great, everyone now wants to tag — but how do you follow the tags you care about? Hence…

What Tools?

You can subscribe to a RSS feed for a tag. Think about it you can get a feed reader on the “photos of BlogHer” if you want.

Within most blogging tools you can find ways to easily get tags into your blogs.

Furl.net — a different kind of social bookmarking service. It is a web filing cabinet. Furl Save a complete copy of the Web Page. It saves a copy in the file cabinet — prevents issues with URL changes or things behind a firewall. Full text search. Create your own metadata. Make categories of tags. You can share certain categories. Finally — easier to spell del.icio.us

Del.icio.us — Serendipity. When you don’t know enough about a topic to search for it — but keep clicking on the tags and find ways other people tagged things. Use it for a loose knit group of people for a community (Agreed on specific tag) — can opt in and opt out. Can’t Tag hop (show me this tag from all users). You may want a private del.icio.us account for those things you want to share.

There will be some type of Wiki that will help.

Structured Blogging and Micro-formats?

Blobs contain great info, but but isn’t always organized well. So the idea behind this is to provide this great structure. Microformat is the behind scenes stuff and structured blogging is the front end. This is to have your blog content on other sites. Hreview create: fill out a form and then cut and paste the code into your site OR use a plug-in. find the plug ins on structuredblogging.org.

Questions:

Mircroformats sounds neat? the format is really new. Yahoo Local just began using it. Looks good, but is still very new. Google is beginning to use it called GoogleBase.

Thank you and “tag on”

IMPORTANT: the wiki on this is www.taggingblogher.pbwiki.com

Section Tags:

blogher_06

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 11:28 pm and is filed under BlogHer: Liveblog. 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.