Why Tagging is Great

I had just started writing about the new tagging feature in our Blog Writer when I saw this timely article - 'Tags' Ease Sifting of Digital Data. It talks about how tags can help us find what we want within the vast amount of information on the Internet. Tags will also help people find your posts. Here's a simple example of how it works. Let's say you're writing a book review. You can use our Blog Writer to add a tag to Technorati, a blog search engine, called "books." Now when someone goes to Technorati and searches on "tag:books" your review shows up among all the other posts and photos with the same tag. "Books" is a pretty broad tag so you can use more specific tags. If your blog service supports categories, then your post is automatically tagged with the category so you can add another tag such as "mysteries." You can use just about anything as a tag and Technorati will create a specific page for you. This is a great way to use tags to create ad-hoc groups. Let's say that you and your friends want to share photos and posts from a group activity. You can all use the same tag, such as a codeword, in your individual blogs and Technorati will aggregrate all of your content when you search on that tag using the "tag:" prefix. If you register at Technorati, you can also create an RSS feed of this search and add it your RSS aggregator or MyYahoo!. We're still in the early stages of tagging so there are lots of new potential applications out there. One big problem that still needs to be solved is when people use different tags for the same thing, but as the article above mentions, engineers are working on clustering tools to tell when different tags are related. The combination of tags and syndication through RSS is powerful. You can get a much wider audience for your posts with just a little more work.