Things are nuts after some time on the road, but I want to post some links here for readers interested in helpful research tools I've covered elsewhere, primarily on the Social Software Weblog.

• Del.icio.us to add private bookmarks and more
• AJAXian meta search engine for tags

I'm writing 60 posts a month on that blog, so there's always lots to read, but those are two of the most helpful in terms of research. See also over at NetSquared:

• Social Bookmarking and Vertical Search
• Community Blogs and Power Research: an interview with Lisa Williams

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
research, web2.0,

Just found Onlywire, very nice. I wrote about it over on Social Software but wanted to make sure readers here saw it too. It's a very easy to use system that tags URLs into up to 15 different social bookmarking services at once. So I can easily save to Del.icio.us and Furl at once. I get the network effects of participating in del.icio.us without losing out on the cached pages in my Furl archive.

I've tried other systems for this and they didn't work for me. This also gives me the courage to try other systems like magnolia - cause I'll save the same things into del.icio.us and furl while experimenting and thus not lose them. Nice!

Beth 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

Full text search doesn't always bring back the most relevant results available; just because a word in used on a page doesn't mean that's really what the page is about. Hence the practice of tagging texts with subject level metadata. There are many ways you can search for blog posts and other items that have been given a certain tag. The best known is via a Technorati Tag Search. Perhaps because this is the most well known option, people often refer to the tags at the end of their posts as Technorati Tags. On one level they may be that, but on another important level that is inaccurate.

The secret of these searchable tags is the rel="tag" part of the code. The rest of the code in a blog tag is just a link to a Technorati tag search for the tag you are applying to your post. You don't have to link to Technorati in order for your post to appear in a Technorati Tag Search! If you are pinging Technorati (should be automatic, I use Feedburner) and if your site is easily index-able - then Technorati is going to find anything you link with rel="tag" in it and it should include that in its tag search results. Except Technorati indexing is kinda wack - as in it isn't 99% reliable.

Nonetheless, it is good to tag your blog posts. People will find your posts and site that way. Here are two bookmarklets below that you can drag and drop onto your browser's toolbar to create tag code for your posts. The first is for traditional "Technorati Tags" and will create links to Technorati Tag searches for your tags. The second bookmarklet may as well be called a "Tag Central Tag Creator" as it will create links to a search for your tag in Tag Central. Both will get your tags indexed in Technorati!

The pros and cons of using Tag Central? Pros: it pulls in results from a greater number of tag supporting platforms, including Upcoming.org, a social calendering service wherein events get tagged. Tag Central brings in all of the same sources as a Technorati Tag Search - and more. Tag Central also makes the RSS feeds for your tag in each platform very easy to subscribe to. The down sides? Tag Central is slow and ugly. But it's still the best way to search the tagspace.

If the use of these bookmarklets is unclear to you, my friend Beth Kanter has made a video screencast about how they work.

These bookmarklets could easily be tweaked to link to any tag search for your tags: Icerocket, Eventful.com, Blinklist - anything! And no matter who your tags link to, Technorati should index them just because there's a rel="tag" in the link code.

If you want to tweak these bookmarklets, just drag them into a text editor, fiddle away, then put in a blog post or web site and they will be draggable just like these ones.

Here they are!

Update: see also this page for a more refined TagCentral bookmarklet.
TechnoratiTags

TagCentralTags

And for this post...
TagCentral Tags: tagging, bookmarklets, Technorati, TagCentral, search, web2.0, blogging

Just a note on something I found interesting, if a bit obscure. Yesterday I listened to this interview with Feedburner's Rick Klau and he said that one of the things their super-RSS management service is striving for is to pull together data threads from various sources into one viewable location. Just came across one place that isn't happening yet.

Please forgive any navel gazing here, but I just noticed from my traffic stats that some one had visited my site about an hour ago from Sonny Cloward's Vermont Non-Profit IT blog. It wasn't the most exciting post I'd written that they came in through, so I went to the linking blog to see why that post was linked to. It turns out that Cloward had tagged the post via del.icio.us, and he runs his recently tagged posts as links in his sidebar. That's a common practice and it's nice to see it in effect.

But I noticed that it wasn't the post's permalink URL that he tagged and thus was linked to on his site, it was the URL of the post in my FeedBurner feed. Then, unsurprising perhaps, when I went to the post's permalink URL and clicked my beloved del.lookup bookmarklet to see who had tagged the post in del.icio.us - it said no one had. And no one has tagged that URL, but apparently Cloward subscribes to my RSS feed (thanks!) and tagged the post directly from his feed reader. So if any of my subscribers tag my posts, that won't show up in the same (far more accessible) data set as tags from casual readers.

That's a real shame, and it complicates the new inclusion in Feedburner feeds of "tag this item in del.icio.us" links after every post in your feed. That option is something feed publishers must chose to activate and I think it's one of several great features they've added in the last week. But the fact that it effectively facilitates a fork in my readship data is a real shame.

I just point this out because I think it's an interesting example of the kinds of things Klau might mean when he says Feedburner aims to bring data streams together in the future.

If, by the way, you are interested in listening to the Klau interview - here's a few tips. If you are uninterested in hearing about advertising in feeds, skip to about 10 minutes into the hour long interview. If you want to hear about cool stuff Klau believes is coming in the RSS world, skip to about 30 minutes in. It's quite a good interview and if you follow that link there's really good show notes. It also includes some basic info about RSS. If it's intro info on FeedBurner that you're looking for, though, you should check out Madge Weinstein's awesome interview with Klau about how Feedburner works in the first place.

Technorati Tags: RSS, tagging, del.icio.us, data, FeedBurner

Give me a couple of days, I am way too upset to blog about anything right now. I think it's terrible, terrible news. I've added a long comment at the coverage over on the Social Software Blog.

My last post was made 24 hours ago:

Title:
"Tagging Museums Sounds Like Fun"

Google Blogsearch: Indexed in in the search results
Icerocket: Indexed, including the "Technorati Tags"
Technorati: Got it
Technorati Tag searches: Nope. Not for museums, not under folksonomy, not under the tag "tags".

You want to know something funny, though? This post of mine Video Sharing With YouTube does appear in the tag search results for the tag "tag" - even though I didn't tag it with the tag tag in the actual post!

And yes, I am pinging them, via Feedburner's Pingshot service.

Technorati Tags: tagging, Technorati, search

Beth Kanter has posted a great article about museums that are using the same ideas behind tagging tools like del.icio.us to make their collections more searchable. In a similar spirit, I'm going to tag this trackback with tags she didn't use for her post...making the article all the more findable using a multitude of tags.

Technorati Tags: museums, art, folksonomy, tags

Earlier this month I proposed using the tag WebJustice2.0 to designate something online as related to issues of inclusion in Web 2.0 - blog posts, events, images etc. related to the efforts to decrease the white male middle and upper class dominance of this emerging field. You can read about the WebJustice2.0 tag stream here.

This week the tag got some great use. You can always see the newest items syndicated at the end of my sidebar, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed yourself at WebJustice2.0 Feed.

Here's what was submitted to the feed this week, I think all via authors' Technorati Tags or readers via Del.icio.us:

• Tara Hunt on Mind Camp: Women in Technology
• Passionate Users at SXSW, from the blog Creating Passionate Users
• A write up titled Web 2.0: Beer, Parties and Inequality by Barb Dybwad from the Social Software Weblog
• Beth Kanter on Revenge of the Female Nerds: Myth Busting, her coverage of a talk by Annalee Newitz and sponsored by the Harvard Computing Society
• Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: Blog Carnivals and Community Indicators a post about a call elsewhere for a "Blog Carnival" with the theme of feminism in the 70's and today.
• New Mythology for Female Nerds - Deborah Elizabeth Finn on the same Newitz talk described above.
• A Short Film About Community Informatics, not really a film but an interesting short article I tagged WebJustice2.0 to get some stuff about class and international issues into the stream.

That's a week in the WebJustice2.0 Attention Stream! Feel free to subscribe to the feed and you'll get these items in your RSS feed reader.

Technorati Tags: webjustice2.0, gender, race, class, web2.0, tagging, attention_stream, nptech, net2

So, in the spirit of being more accessible to new users, I have finally taken the time to post some introductory articles here and link them from the sidebar. Now when visitors to this site look on the side, one of the first things they'll see is:

Introductions to:

• Blogs
• RSS Syndicated Feeds
• Social Bookmarking/Tagging

Please do check out the intros and share any suggestions for revisions. Readers of my old blog may remember that I had posted there introductions to wikis and podcasting as well. For now at least, I'm just going to concentrate on these three items on the list. The field of Web2.0 tools is so huge that I need to specialize to some degree. I'll keep reading and posting about various weird tools, but what I really want to be doing with clients is setting them up with the life-changing pyramid of feeds, tagging and blogging.

Feeds can be set up to automatically deliver information on any subject and items of interest can be tagged into your social bookmarking archive. This information then makes great fodder for blogging. It's a beautiful system, really.

Technorati Tags: introduction, web2.0, blogging, RSS, tagging, social_bookmarking, consulting