Category Archives: Tagging

Adding “del.icio.us this” and “furl this” links to your blog

Leave a reply

Tip of the day: you can add one click links to the end of each blog post for readers to archive that post in their del.icio.us or Furl archives. I think this makes it all the easier for people to save, return to and effectively promote your post and your site. If reading posts all in a row on the front page of a blog, you can bookmark a particular post without having to click through to it’s unique permalink pagel. Here’s how you add that option…

Inside your blog’s HTML template there should be a template for each post. In Blogger you can find the end of the post because that’s where the “leave a comment” link will be (you can add this code right after that link) and in WordPress you will have a post template file findable via presentation-template editor, or the post template will be in your main template.

In Blogger, you can add:

<em>Bookmark this post in <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” target=”_blank”>Del.icio.us</a> or <a href=”http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<$BlogItemTitle$>&u=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>” target=”_blank”>Furl</a>. (<a href=”http://marshallk.com/introduction-to-social-bookmarking/” target=”_blank”>definition</a>)<br /></em>

In WordPress you can add:

Bookmark this post in <a href=”http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<?php the_title(); ?>&u=<?php the_permalink() ?>” target=”_blank”>Furl</a> or <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” target=”_blank”>Del.icio.us</a><br/> (<a href=”http://marshallk.com/introduction-to-social-bookmarking/” target=”_blank”>definition</a>)<br />

As you can see perhaps, the basic code here is the same for both, what differs is how your blogging software identifies the permalink of whatever post you are on. So if you are using something other than Blogger or WordPress, you can adjust that part accordingly. And of course you can remove, replace or tweak the link to my definition of social bookmarking however you like.

Please note that Furling links this way will not save you a cached copy of the post the way Furl likes to do (thus you will get an error-ish mssg) but don’t worry, the URL and all other info you enter into the Furl box will be saved!

Let me know if this doesn’t work for you and I’ll see if I can help. Adding things like this is an example of what I do as part of my blog optimization services. If you are interested in having me set your blog up with the best in new tools for maximum impact and awesomeness, let me know. I offer blog optimization services at a very reasonable cost – your increase in traffic and sophistication will be more than worth it.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Inequities in Web 2.0: Let’s Tag About It

Leave a reply

The phenomena being called Web2.0 is disproportionately influenced by white men. Issues raised by anti-racist, anti-classist and disability and gender-rights activists in other contexts are just as relevant to this new technological and political development (Web2.0) as they are to any other.

There have been some very good articles written about this situation, including for example:

So those are just some of the posts about these issues that have been commented on a lot. But how can a person find old and new blog posts, photos, podcasts or events about these subjects? I searched inside my own Furl.net and Del.icio.us archives and in the general archive for Del.icio.us/tag/web2.0+gender. Interestingly, there is really only one post referred to so far in Del.icio.us/tag/web2.0+race.

These conversations would be easier to find and keep up with if there was a common tag used. I propose this: webjustice2.0. Feel free to come up with some thing else, of course. But if that sounds good to you, then the following options are available:

  • If you use the tag in any of the following:

    del.icio.us (or any similar social bookmarking service that synchs with your del.icio.us account)
    Furl.net Social Bookmarking
    Technorati Blog Search
    Flickr Photos
    43Things Goal Making/Sharing
    Upcoming.org Events, Owned by Yahoo!
    Eventful.com Events not owned by Yahoo!

  • Then it will be delivered in this RSS feed: WebJustice2.0 RSS Feed
  • If you’d like to display the 10 most recent items in the feed on your website (duplicates not removed right now) then you can copy and paste the following code into your template. Feel free to change anything you like. To see a sample of what it will look like, you can look at my blog’s sidebar.

    WebJustice2.0 Discussion<br /><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/SPQ1BO029H.js”><noscript><a href=”http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/SPQ1BO029H.html”>Click for "WebJustice2.0".</a> By <a href=”http://www.feeddigest.com/”>Feed Digest</a></noscript></script>

I am sending a link to this post to the authors of the above example articles and a few other people I think might be interested. This system should be easy to use, just subscribe to the RSS feed for tag and tag relevant items online. And of course if anyone wants to propose or use an alternate tag – there’s absolutely nothing stopping you. I hope this will help the discussion by enabling easier, more thorough participation.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Technorati Tips

Leave a reply

I had the pleasure to talk to Ryan King of Technorati at Tag Camp this weekend and our conversation included a couple of things I thought I’d share with readers here.

  • Spam Blogs I saw Alex personally zapping splogs by hand from Technorati search results while we were talking! Apparently they have a variety of algorithms to do this automatically as well, but it was nice to see him care enough to clean things up when he had a minute. He also told me about having conversations with some of the big search engines about how to deal with this problem. So contrary to Dave Winer’s bizarre statement in conversation this weekend that RSS feeds for search were worthless because of the spam – I have faith that the problem is being mitigated as we speak. One way or the other, the last thing I’m going to do is give up on search-to-RSS! It’s absolutely invaluable, even if I have to take some extra time to construct less spammy queries. Unfortunately Winer was just one of several older men who were so full of themselves they had a hard time communicating with anyone around them. They didn’t contribute much either. To step back from that, I found several people who agreed with me that results are amongst the most filled with spam.
  • Indexing I’ve been conversing with several people who are having trouble getting their Typepad sites indexed by Technorati, and thus are not seeing their tags show up in tag searches there. Alex showed me the header tag that could be changed to reflect the Feedburner RSS feeds people are using. I’ll work on that and hopefully the problem will be solved.
  • Tagging Turns out that when they say they are indexing everything with rel=”tag” in the link code, they mean it. I asked what sorts of things this made possible and Kevin showed me how instead of just putting his Technorati Tags at the end of blog posts, he sometimes adds the rel=”tag” after the a href=”” in links mid-post. For example, when he linked to a definition in Wikipedia he made that link a tag as well. Try it out, I’m going to with this post.
  • Satire A side project Kevin is doing is Supr.c.ilio.us and the Supr.c.ilio.us blog. Mea Culpa: Kevin is collaborating on these projects with Eran Globen. It seems to be all about mocking the most absurd tendencies of the Web2.0 inner circle and related hype. It’s pretty funny, sometimes. If you’re looking for stuff like that, check it out.
  • Vertical Search If you go to Technorati proper (not tag search) you’ll see that they are not offering vertical search, or search within a subject. The categories don’t seem very differentiated and the results appear limited, but it looks like a good idea and one I’m sure they will improve. I used it just a minute ago to search for blog posts about Looksmart’s product Furl without getting results filled with random blogs that happen to use Furl for archiving. I liked that I could search inside blogs about the Web, about the Internet and about Technology (?). Unfortunately, I didn’t get many results. So we’ll see. It does seem like a helpful step towards improving blog search results. And that’s important.

So that’s one conversation I had at Tag Camp, I’ll be discussing more over the next few days. For now I have to finish up here in S.F. and get back home.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

How to be Found by Technorati

1 Reply

Several people have been asking me why their blog posts are not appearing in Technorati search results, even after they use the Technorati Tag bookmarklet I wrote about earlier this week. (Clarification: I didn’t create it, I found it on an old web site that has since gone offline, but I had it archived in Furl.net.) Here’s what’s going on….

When you write a blog post, it has to be indexed by search engines in order for it to show up in the search engine’s results. Google goes nuts and crawls all over the web indexing like crazy – but that doesn’t mean that Google or anybody else is guaranteed to find what you’ve written. Even if you link to someone’s page, that doesn’t mean they’ll discover that until someone travels that connection – be it an indexing robot or a visitor who leaves tracks through your traffic monitoring program. (Technorati tags are really just a particular way to link to Technorati, but they still have to index the link.)

The way to get indexed quickly is to do something called pinging. You can set up (or I can set up for you) your blog to automatically tell the blog search engines (like Technorati) “Hey, look over here, I have new content for you to index!” Pinging is big business but it doesn’t have to be complicated for bloggers.

The best solution right now: use Feedburner.com for your RSS feed (a great idea for many reasons) and use their Pingshot service to automatically ping the top blog search engines. This will include Technorati and shebang – you’re Technorati Tagged posts should show up very soon after you post them in Technorati Tag Searches. Update: This post is appearing in Technorati 10 minutes after first posted.

There are alternatives, like Pingoat, but now that Feedburner offers this service it’s a not an issue. Depending on how quickly you find this post, Technorati may not have indexed it yet. But I wrote the previous one just this morning and if you click on its tags you’ll see that Technorati found it within 2 hours.

Let me know if I can help you with this or if it’s still confusing. Also, let me know if you would like to hire me to get your blog all souped up for maximum traction with all these new tools. There are many things that can be set up once and that you’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of without thinking about it in the future. My blog optimization rates are reasonable and you’ll be very glad we did it.

For now, I’m going to go back and link to this article from the original post about the bookmarklet. I should have told readers, “don’t forget to ping!” Once all your ducks are in a row you’ll see that this stuff is easy and powerful to use.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

NPTech Meta Feed Update

Leave a reply

Several months ago I was excited to find out about an attention stream for non-profit technologists that utilized the tag “nptech.” Althought begun in Del.icio.us, I found that the tag was being used in many different platforms to tag many different kinds of online content – from photos to upcoming events. There’s discussion and aggregated content over at at http://nptech.krazy.com. I thought it would be helpful to create an RSS feed that pulls together items tagged nptech from all the sources listed at Tag Central.net. I should probably update the sources to include podcast tags.

The aggregated feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/NPTechMetaFeed.

So it’s been about 2 months now since that feed was created, and I realized last night that I should probably share some statistics from Feedburner.

There are currently 21 subscribers to the RSS feed, NPTech Meta Feed.

That number has grown steadily in the last two months. (graphic coming in a minute)

The articles most clicked through so far are:

LATechSurvey.pdf (12 clickthroughs)
How about a nonprofit related application? (7 clickthroughs)
theses8.12.low.pdf (7 clickthroughs)

To be fair, two of those are pdf files, which had to be clicked through in order to be read, as pdfs don’t appear in an RSS reader. Other links people have clicked through the most to comment on or otherwise do more than just read include:

Scuttle: de.lirio.us
Michael Stein’s NON-PROFIT TECHNOLOGY BLOG: Bread and Butter 2.0 (I liked this one a lot.)

This week’s most popular clickthrough has been a podcast on IT Conversations about non-profits blogging. Unfortunately, whoever bookmarked it in Furl appears to have bookmarked the download link and not the podcast’s permalink – so clicking through just gets an error message. That podcast, titled Non-Profits Blogging can be found at http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail439.html

Ok, so that’s a run down of the NPTech Meta Feed so far. I’ll try and write a similar blog post every from time to time. This is a good example of a community of practice creating an attention stream using a tag.

These statistics were gathered via the wonderful folks at FeedBurner. If you are curious about the ins and outs of how RSS works and how these stats are gathered, you can listen to Madge Wienstien’s great interview with a FeedBurner exec.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Tagging Bookmarklet and How-To Screencast

4 Replies

Update: Just talked to a Windows person who says that the new Explorer 7 blocks some javascript bookmarklets. Going into Preferences/Security and enabling javascript will save soom bookmarklets, but not neccesarily this one. I’m going to have to get to the bottom of this for many different reasons, but it looks like this is the worst of Microsoft’s new security philosophy: block users from changing almost anything, so they don’t leave anything open to hostile intrusion. But the toolbar? I’ll figure out something asap, but I’m on a Mac so we’ll see. But I want to enable lots of Windows users to use tools like this, so I’ll see what I can figure out. In the meantime, check out the awesome screencast Beth made.

See also this post about pinging to make sure your tagged blog posts will show up in Technorati.

Drumroll please…

BlogTags

Ok, that link right there should work for people using Macs and PCs (thanks to my brother Tom the PC user!). Beth Kanter created a terrific little screencast about how to use it! Here’s the screencast itself and here’s the write up on the bookmarklet. What a neat example of collaboration, huh? Beth’s work is really cool, she’s got a great blog to check out too.

Well, thanks for the patience everybody. Hopefully this will all work now for everyone.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,