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