Category Archives: Tagging

Feedburner and Del.icio.us: Pulling Threads Together? Maybe Someday

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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.

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Technorati Tag Indexing: Is There a Problem?

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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.

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Tagging Museums Sounds Like Fun

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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.

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A Week in the WebJustice2.0 Stream: An Overview

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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:

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.

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Introductions to Blogging, RSS, Tagging Posted

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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:

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.

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Self-Submission: Spam or Not?

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One of the things I often do after making a post to this or any other blog is to tag the post in both Furl.net and Del.icio.us. I make sure to include tags like viagra, texas-hold-em and *&% expansion with every post. Just kidding.

But seriously, do you think that tagging your own blog posts into social bookmarking databases is a form of spam? I don’t. Here’s what I emailed to someone who accused me of spamming Furl after my last post.

People do ask me all the time, is it ok to bookmark my own blog posts? I think it is, and here are a couple my thoughts on the subject:
*if services like Furl and del.icio.us are collaborative databases, why wait until someone else submits my posts to the database? Doesn’t it sound like a good idea to make the post as findable as possible?
*in del.icio.us at least, you can see that no one else has bookmarked a new post I submit, so the only thing that would lead you to click through would be your own interest relative to the title.
*Most importantly: I try to title and describe the posts I submit to Furl and del.icio.us as accurately and usefully as possible. I also make posts that offer real value to readers. So when you see a post of my own that I put in the database, you’re not deceived into clicking through it, or being pointed towards something that’s of no use.

Does that seem fair?

What do you think?