13 Reasons to Use Tags
01.09.06Beth Kanter has aggregated a number of interesting discussions regarding the value of blogging and tagging in the non-profit world. I'd like to throw in my 2 cents by making two lists that summarize, as I know them, the primary reasons you'd want to use two different kinds of tagging.
Putting Tags in Your Blog Posts ("Technorati Tags")
1. So I can find your post when I'm doing research on the subject you are writing about. Every blog post you make is an artifact available for our collective intelligence to utilize - adding some quality metadata to it is a social responsibility.
2. Be it through Technorati or TagCentral, when I do a tag search for any term, I like to find blog posts, images, bookmarked items and upcoming events that are all tagged with the same term.
3. So I can get some idea what sort of perspective you write from when I scan your blog, I look at titles and tags. Your particular "folksonomy" can give me some idea whether you're a programmer, an activist, a PR person etc.
4. I like subscribing to tag search feeds on a variety of topics, be it a noun that I have an ongoing interest in (you know, a person, place or thing) or a group concept like the attention streams Nptech or WebJustice2.0.
5. It's not that hard to do anymore. Whether you are using a Word Press plug-in, any number of Firefox related tagging tools or one of these two bookmarklets I've posted - the energy investment required to add tags to your own posts is really relatively low. It's lower than what's required to add images to your posts, or several other elements that are not uncommon. In order to get the most out of this medium, it's a good idea to invest some amount more energy than the minimum required to post text alone to your blog.
Update: Call this #14, but Jonny Baker points out the following. Though some blogging platforms support categories, which apparently are indexed as tags by Technorati at least - you probably don't want as many categories on your blog as you do specific subject headings/tags for tag search engines to discover you through. Good point!
Top reasons to tag items online with del.icio.us or another social bookmarking tool.
1. "What article/web site was it that I was looking at last week/month/year about that topic?" Your browser bookmarks, organized alphabetically by title or maybe folder if you're really into it, are not going to answer this question nearly as effectively as an online database organized with multiple tags, title, URL and notes fields.
2. Organize your bookmarks for yourself and send a URL to someone else with one click by including the "for:" tag.
3. Offer other people a chance to discover your suggested resources on a topic not just from the past, but in the future as well.
4. Information overload is real, and RSS can make it worse or better depending on how you organize your feeds. One way or the other, there is now so much information available that failure to organize what you find useful in an appropriate way will lead to countless lost opportunities.
5. Do you like to have a list of links on the sidebar of your blog? The RSS feed for items given any particular tag or combination of tags can be displayed automatically using tools like FeedDigest. This is just one of many ways that tagging and RSS work well together. Furthermore, it's just one of the many ways that a tagged item is a more manipulable item.
6. Contribute to everyone's shared knowledge on a given topic. This is so important. See items 1, 2 and 4 in the first list above.
7. Someday soon there will be a tagging system that will:
- integrate with del.icio.us and offer tag selection in a similar manner
- allow varying levels of privacy and permission
- save a cached copy of every page you tag
- perform a full text search of all fields, the full text of the URL and its cache
- include other features not yet imagined.
You'll be in a better position to use this next system if you learn to use the best system available today, del.icio.us. My Corante Web Hub buddy Otis Gospodnetic may have already created this in Simpy.
At least it wasn't another top 10 list! Any questions? Feel free to ask in comments, there's a bunch of people here who can help answer them. For more information on the subject, here's all the posts I've made here on tagging.
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
tagging, tags, Technorati, TagCentral, del.icio.us, blogging, web2.0, bookmarking
January 9th, 2006 at
Nice post - it summarizes things for people new to tagging. However, calling del.icio.us the best service in its category is a little bold. In point #7 you listed “someday soon” features. Del.icio.us doesn’t have any of the applicable features from that list. On the other hand, SImpy has most of them: privacy, full-text search, cached copy (currently just a pointer to Wayback machine, but I actually do have cached pages), del.icio.us integration is there, and for other features: Topic Filters and Groups are farily rare in social bookmarking area, but Simpy has them.
The “for:” trick seems nice at first, but as I’ve said elsewhere, it really pollutes the tag namespace. One can achieve the same without pollution, as Simpy does it.
January 9th, 2006 at
Marshall:
Wow, nice post!
Did you ping Amy too?
January 9th, 2006 at
Well folks, there you have it - a feature overview of Simpy! Thanks Otis!
January 10th, 2006 at
Only a partial one, of course. There is a lot more there, and some interesting things are coming.
January 11th, 2006 at
[…] These are bookmarklets you can drag and drop onto your browser’s toolbar to create the code for tags at the end of your blog posts. For reasons why you’d want to do that, see 13 Reasons to Use Tags. If it is unclear how to do this, see the screencast at the end of this post. […]
January 12th, 2006 at
[…] Marshall Kirkpatrick » 13 Reasons to Use Tags 使用Tag的十三个理由 (Bookmark tags: tags) […]
February 14th, 2006 at
[…] “Inhale feeds. Exhale blog posts.” Marshall Kirkpatrick has these words as the ‘tagline’ for his blog! And man, don’t I totally agree with him. Because thats what my life (personal and work) is all about ! a few caveats to be very specific “inhale posts, blogs, podcasts and rss feeds; exhale OPMLs , some blog posts and of course think think think …..“ In his post - “13 Reasons to Tag” he basically is highlighting the ‘groups 2.0′ concept that I have been feeling the need for and I am sure everyone will feel the need as they realize - information is coming at a increased speed, size and also non-linearly in all types (text, audio, images and video). He says: Information overload is real, and RSS can make it worse or better depending on how you organize your feeds. One way or the other, there is now so much information available that failure to organize what you find useful in an appropriate way will lead to countless lost opportunities. His ideal scenario: Someday soon there will be a tagging system that will: […]
February 25th, 2006 at
Social Tagging For The Enterprise
One such technology is social tagging (or “social bookmarking”), best exemplified with del.icio.us and many articles illustrating how to best exploit social tagging, such as this one by Marshall Kirkpatrick and this one by Brendon Connelly, and other…
February 25th, 2006 at
[…] I wrote a post a bit ago on “13 reasons to use tags,” people liked it pretty well. http://marshallk.com/13-reasons-to-use-tags […]
February 27th, 2006 at
Why Do You Tag? My 5 Reasons
Over at David Weinberger’s weblog, and not long ago, he created a weblog post, Why do you tag?, referring another entry from Tara Hunt’s on What are your reasons for tagging? And I just couldn’t help stopping by and commenting…
March 16th, 2006 at
Very good article. Thanks for sharing.
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September 11th, 2006 at
[…] Started thinking about adding tags to my posts and asked myself the question: Why should I add tags to my posts? A quick search turned up this post which provides some good answers and also provides reasons why one would want to do online tagging (social bookmarking). Marshall, your site is in need of protection from comment spammers. […]
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May 23rd, 2007 at
[…] Marshall Kirpatrick has some more great reasons why you should use tags in his 13 Reasons to Use Tags article. […]
June 2nd, 2007 at
Coming soon: 13 reasons to monitor your comments …