Ok, if you’ve seen the comments after my last post about the wonderful Technorati Tag bookmarklet, you’ll notice there’s some issues that need to be addressed. Your help would be much appreciated:

On not being able to make it work:

1. I’m on a Mac, but 80% of my visitors yesterday were using Windows XP. I’m still not sure why folks are having trouble dragging and dropping the bookmarklet onto their toolbar, but if there are any Windows XP folks out there with suggestions, I think we’d love to see them.
2. Second, four visitors yesterday had javascript disabled on your browsers. So if that’s you, you’ll need to change that before you can use this – and lots of other great javascript based tools.

Philosophically: there was some question on whether it’s good or even ok to tag your own blog posts. Here’s a couple thoughts.

1. Technorati Tags in particular are something that bloggers themselves have to apply to their own blog posts. Tags in other systems (like del.icio.us or Simpy) can be applied by readers wanting to describe a particular article or web site, but Technorati Tags are applied by bloggers to their own posts.
2. Tagging your own blog posts is a way to tell the world that the post exists and where it fits in the blogosphere, what it’s about. We’re trying to communicate here, so that’s a good thing. It’s similar to pinging search engines after each post (Feedburner does this automatically once you set it up, or ask me for more info on this if you need it.) Or, for a brick-and-mortar example – it’s like having a garage sale and puting up fliers around the neighborhood, or throwing a party and sending out invitations. It would be spammy if you put a flier under the doormat of every house in town, but on the utility poles or mailed to your friends is just fine. Technorati Tags are like community billboards organized by subject.
3. Placing these links at the end of each post is a way to direct readers to what other people in the blogosphere are writing about the same subject. This may be mitigated by the fact that the tools are new enough that many readers don’t know that, but just so you know: when you see that someone has added a Technorati Tag for “Web2.0” or “environmental_justice” to the end of a post on their blog – you can click on that link to go to Technorati’s Tag page and see a whole lot of other blog posts (and other resources) that have been tagged with the same tag. It’s a great way to get a feel for the larger discussion on any topic.
4. If you think it’s ugly to see the tags at the end of each post, you can delete the text that the link is tied to and just keep the link itself tied to a space or a dot or some other place holder. This bookmarklet makes that take another step, but I believe it’s possible.
5. I go so far as to bookmark my own blog posts in my del.icio.us and Furl.net archives. It’s a collective database out there on the web, why wait for someone else to submit what you’ve written into that database? I get visitors every day because people are subscribed to the RSS feed for all items tagged “RSS” in del.icio.us for example. People are interested in these particular channels of content, so they subscribe, and for now the cost of entry is nearly nothing. So if you have something to submit to these channels that people are interested in, put your content in there, give it a good headline and see if people like it. If they do, they will subscribe to your own site’s RSS feed. Web2.0 is about everyone being able to publish and distribute content. Tagging is like our version of TV Guide, each tag is a channel that you can view, subscribe to or ignore. There’s not a solution to tag spam yet, but there’s not that much of it out there yet either.

So I can’t recommend Technorati Tags and the bookmarklet found in the previous post highly enough. I use them every single day. Let me know if anything I’ve posted here is unclear or if you still can’t get the bookmarklet to work. It really should be easy as can be.

Technorati Tags: tagging, bookmarklets, Technorati, tags, blogging
Check it out! There’s those tags again!

After writing this post complaining about Furl.net, I talked to the CTO of LookSmart, Furl’s parent company, for quite awhile this morning. It was a great conversation about the tagosphere and Furl in particular. He was very open to hearing some thoughts about increasing the usability of Furl and bringing it more in tune with the best of Web 2.0. Sounds like serious changes are already underway. At the same time, he said it was a top priority to make their service as understandable to non-geeks as possible. I think that’s a great priority, so we’ll see if we can meet somewhere in the middle. That would be best for me, too, as few of my clients are super-geeky. Teaching them to use tools that are powerful, but easy to use, is ideal.

Technorati Tags: Furl, social_bookmarking, web2.0

So I sent an email to Furl customer service last week (posted here) and it turns out the CTO of LookSmart, Furl’s parent company is going to give me a phone call in a couple days. Cool! So if anybody else has any questions you’d like me to ask him about Furl, post them in the comments here.

Technorati Tags: Furl, tagging, social_bookmarking, folksonomy