Tagging for world domination
.26.8 | No Comments »
August 26th, 2006 by Alex
Today we're at BarCamp Vancouver, where I'm facilitating a session on "Tagging for World Domination." The news that Wink is rolling out version 2.0 of their service is a nice reminder that there are more and more options for using tags as useful blogging fodder: Wink itself would offer a great variant on my tagging trick #1, below.
I'm hoping that lots of other folks will share their tips and tricks on how tagging can help to add value to online content, drive traffic to blogs, or generally build stronger online communities.
Here are some of my basic tips for tagging success:
- Choose a unique tag for your work and/or organization and use it consistently. This tag should be one word, or two words smooshed together, so you can use it on any tag-friendly site.
- Invite other people to tag content with "your" tag so that they're contributing to your site, too -- like we do with Flickr photos on Change Everything.
- Aggregate your tag back onto your site from as many sources as possible (del.icio.us, technorati, furl, flickr, 43things etc).
- If you subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds in your primary newsreader/aggregator, track your crucial tags (your own organization's unique tag, your del.icio.us "for:" tag) on your personalized Google homepage, and make that your browser's default home page so you see it often.
- Tags aren't limited to explicitly taggy services and apps. You can use your tag as a search term in PubSub, for example, or "tag" your iPhoto pix by putting tags into your comments fields.
- Create a "secret" tag for people in your organization to use for stuff you just want to share internally. Tell everyone to track that in whatever aggregator they visit most often.
- Identify a set of tags that together encompass the topics you blog about, and track them in your primary aggregator as a source of blogging inspiration.
Trick 1: Boosting traffic with tags
One of the tricks I've been meaning to document is how tracking a tag can help you insinuate your way into a large-scale conversation. Let's take the tag "tagging" as an example.
Imagine I want people to start visiting -- and talking about -- this web page. I figure the people who will be interested in this page are people who are interested in tagging.
I go to Technorati and search on the tag "tagging", which brings me to a page of posts tagged "tagging". Then I look for a recent post with a lot of inbound links, because I figure it's getting a lot of traffic.
And the world of tagging freaks being small, the overwhelming winner here is a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick over at TechCrunch. Just inserting that URL into this post is enough to make this show up as a comment since TechCrunch uses TrackBack, but it would be really obnoxious to do that because this blog post isn't really about Marshall's story. So I wrote a paragraph that creates a conceptual bridge between his story and this blog post, which is why this blog post begins with a discussion of Wink.
Tada! Marshall's thousands of readers are now going to come across an intriguing link to a blog post that should interest them, since they're interested in tagging.
And for all those TechCrunch readers who slogged through this post and are now feeling annoyed, let me point out that this tip is a great way to use the new and improved Wink, too: search on a given tag (like "tagging") within Wink and you'll find blog posts that readers are tagging there. Comment on one of those blog posts and you're linking into a conversation that you know people are reading.
Note that if I were writing about a narrower or less-blogged topic -- like hacktivism -- I could just search Technorati for blog posts containing the term "hacktivism", and find a post there that I could use as a conversation hook. But one of the virtues of tags is that they let you accomplish the same thing even with a very commonly used term (like tagging) by letting you zoom in on the blog posts that are really about that thing.
Trick 2: Organizing content with tags
Another nice trick is using inbound automatic categorization of tagged content. Both of the platforms I use to blog have options for tagging inbound content according to its original tags. For WordPress, the FeedWordPress plugin offers the option of tagging inbound content with its original tags (and you can set the additional option of creating any new tags, or limiting tags just to those categories/tags that already exist on your site.) In Drupal, the combo of Aggregator2 and autotaxonomy let you parse incoming content for tags, and apply those tags to the content as it's republished on your site.
What that means is that you can use your unique tag in conjunction with other tags to organize your content collection into subcategories. For example, we can aggregate content tagged SocialSignal onto our web site, and it will be tagged with whatever additional tags we used on the original site.
Additional resources
Tag your way to del.icio.us domination
Powerblogher questions: on tagging, bookmarking and wikis
Tagging for world domination
.26.8 | No Comments »
August 26th, 2006 by Alex
Today we're at BarCamp Vancouver, where I'm facilitating a session on "Tagging for World Domination." The news that Wink is rolling out version 2.0 of their service is a nice reminder that there are more and more options for using tags as useful blogging fodder: Wink itself would offer a great variant on my tagging trick #1, below.
I'm hoping that lots of other folks will share their tips and tricks on how tagging can help to add value to online content, drive traffic to blogs, or generally build stronger online communities.
Here are some of my basic tips for tagging success:
- Choose a unique tag for your work and/or organization and use it consistently. This tag should be one word, or two words smooshed together, so you can use it on any tag-friendly site.
- Invite other people to tag content with "your" tag so that they're contributing to your site, too -- like we do with Flickr photos on Change Everything.
- Aggregate your tag back onto your site from as many sources as possible (del.icio.us, technorati, furl, flickr, 43things etc).
- If you subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds in your primary newsreader/aggregator, track your crucial tags (your own organization's unique tag, your del.icio.us "for:" tag) on your personalized Google homepage, and make that your browser's default home page so you see it often.
- Tags aren't limited to explicitly taggy services and apps. You can use your tag as a search term in PubSub, for example, or "tag" your iPhoto pix by putting tags into your comments fields.
- Create a "secret" tag for people in your organization to use for stuff you just want to share internally. Tell everyone to track that in whatever aggregator they visit most often.
- Identify a set of tags that together encompass the topics you blog about, and track them in your primary aggregator as a source of blogging inspiration.
Trick 1: Boosting traffic with tags
One of the tricks I've been meaning to document is how tracking a tag can help you insinuate your way into a large-scale conversation. Let's take the tag "tagging" as an example.
Imagine I want people to start visiting -- and talking about -- this web page. I figure the people who will be interested in this page are people who are interested in tagging.
I go to Technorati and search on the tag "tagging", which brings me to a page of posts tagged "tagging". Then I look for a recent post with a lot of inbound links, because I figure it's getting a lot of traffic.
And the world of tagging freaks being small, the overwhelming winner here is a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick over at TechCrunch. Just inserting that URL into this post is enough to make this show up as a comment since TechCrunch uses TrackBack, but it would be really obnoxious to do that because this blog post isn't really about Marshall's story. So I wrote a paragraph that creates a conceptual bridge between his story and this blog post, which is why this blog post begins with a discussion of Wink.
Tada! Marshall's thousands of readers are now going to come across an intriguing link to a blog post that should interest them, since they're interested in tagging.
And for all those TechCrunch readers who slogged through this post and are now feeling annoyed, let me point out that this tip is a great way to use the new and improved Wink, too: search on a given tag (like "tagging") within Wink and you'll find blog posts that readers are tagging there. Comment on one of those blog posts and you're linking into a conversation that you know people are reading.
Note that if I were writing about a narrower or less-blogged topic -- like hacktivism -- I could just search Technorati for blog posts containing the term "hacktivism", and find a post there that I could use as a conversation hook. But one of the virtues of tags is that they let you accomplish the same thing even with a very commonly used term (like tagging) by letting you zoom in on the blog posts that are really about that thing.
Trick 2: Organizing content with tags
Another nice trick is using inbound automatic categorization of tagged content. Both of the platforms I use to blog have options for tagging inbound content according to its original tags. For WordPress, the FeedWordPress plugin offers the option of tagging inbound content with its original tags (and you can set the additional option of creating any new tags, or limiting tags just to those categories/tags that already exist on your site.) In Drupal, the combo of Aggregator2 and autotaxonomy let you parse incoming content for tags, and apply those tags to the content as it's republished on your site.
What that means is that you can use your unique tag in conjunction with other tags to organize your content collection into subcategories. For example, we can aggregate content tagged SocialSignal onto our web site, and it will be tagged with whatever additional tags we used on the original site.
Additional resources
Tag your way to del.icio.us domination
Powerblogher questions: on tagging, bookmarking and wikis
Learning about warranties from London Drugs
.21.8 | No Comments »
August 21st, 2006 by Alex
London Drugs wins my customer service prize of the month for its speedy resolution of my camera dilemma. I heard right away from their warranty department. It turns out they were about as happy with VAC’s warranty progam as I was: they’ve since brought their warranty program in-house so that they can resolve customer issues themselves. While I was covered by the VAC program rather than London Drugs’ own protection plan, they offered to give me a very decent credit towards a new camera, as I requested.
I’m now the proud owner of a Canon SD600, and the previous Canon lemon is off to the great camera depot in the sky. And I did put it under London Drugs’ protection plan, since I figured if they were this helpful in a situation where they weren’t technically responsible for the warranty, their warranty must really be worth something.
The larger lesson here, I’m betting, is that it’s worth asking who runs the warranty program before you buy an extended warranty. From now on I’m only buying extended warranties from stores that, like London Drugs, run their own warranty programs.
Hola, Hola Churro!
.16.8 | No Comments »
August 16th, 2006 by Alex
We just discovered a new favorite spot: Hola Churro on Broadway east of Balaclava. Their Mexican food is delicious, reasonably priced, and offers great options for our special needs team of wheat-free/dairy-free eaters (yum, tamales!) and vegans (yum, mystery vegetarian dish!) Best of all, we discovered that they have free wifi, so we've added them to this list of Vancouver cafes with free wifi.
But there just aren't enough cafes offering that crucial combination of good food, vegan options, cheap convenient parking, clean bathrooms, power outlets and most crucially, free wifi. So if you have a favourite spot that has everything except the free wifi, encourage them to add wifi.
Hey...should we start something that would let us all collectively lobby for free wifi? Maybe we could make print-em-yourself business cards that us would-be-wifi-ers can leave (along wtih a generous tip) to let a restaurant know we want them to go wifi?
Hola, Hola Churro!
.16.8 | No Comments »
August 16th, 2006 by Alex
We just discovered a new favorite spot: Hola Churro on Broadway east of Balaclava. Their Mexican food is delicious, reasonably priced, and offers great options for our special needs team of wheat-free/dairy-free eaters (yum, tamales!) and vegans (yum, mystery vegetarian dish!) Best of all, we discovered that they have free wifi, so we've added them to this list of Vancouver cafes with free wifi.
But there just aren't enough cafes offering that crucial combination of good food, vegan options, cheap convenient parking, clean bathrooms, power outlets and most crucially, free wifi. So if you have a favourite spot that has everything except the free wifi, encourage them to add wifi.
Hey...should we start something that would let us all collectively lobby for free wifi? Maybe we could make print-em-yourself business cards that us would-be-wifi-ers can leave (along wtih a generous tip) to let a restaurant know we want them to go wifi?
How about bylaws that are geared to specific decibel levels?
.4.8 | No Comments »
August 4th, 2006 by Alex
Because I'm guessing not all motorcycles are as loud as the vintage bike our neighbour restored and used to warm up outside our window at 6 am.
How about bylaws that are geared to specific decibel levels?
.4.8 | No Comments »
August 4th, 2006 by Alex
Because I'm guessing not all motorcycles are as loud as the vintage bike our neighbour restored and used to warm up outside our window at 6 am.
The dirty truth about extended warranties
.2.8 | 2 Comments »
August 2nd, 2006 by Alex
See my update on how London Drugs resolved this situation.
I know, I know…extended warranties are a scam, a way for electronics stores to up the profit margin on consumer electronics sales. But when our Olympus camera blew a pixel after less than two years, we replaced it with a Canon that we purchased from the same London Drugs that sold us the first camera — but this time we backed it up with an extended warranty. Maybe it was a scam, we figured, but at least we’d save ourselves some hassle if the thing broke down.
Sure enough, the LCD went wonky within months of our purchase, and our video captures became unwatchable. We took the camera back to London Drugs, who shipped it off for repair under the manufacturer’s one-year warranty. Six weeks later, we got it back…and then this spring, the problem recurred. Since we were just weeks away from the arrival of our second child, we took the camera right into London Drugs for repair, so we’d have it back in time to capture our new baby’s first weeks.
This time, the extended warranty kicked in, and London Drugs shipped the product off to Victoria Camera Service, the West Coast repair shop for VAC Service, who provides London Drugs with extended warranties. Another six weeks passed before we got our camera back — and less than two months later, the problem recurred again — just in time to screw up our photos and videos of new baby. And just weeks before the warranty is set to expire.
With a third-time recurrence of the same problem — just weeks after a previous repair — I figured VAC would want to resolve the problem conclusively, presumably by replacing the camera or providing credit towards replacement. After all, their web site says their warranties are all about customer satisfaction:
Our OEM programs are designed to increase customer satisfaction, long after the initial manufacturer’s warranty period has expired. Our programs will help you increase after sale product revenues while enhancing brand loyalty. Whether you’re looking for OEM branded service contracts or call handling and administration support, we offer cost effective solutions for the challenges faced by manufacturers.
Apparently, this message has yet to trickle down to their call center. Neither the phone rep nor the center supervisor could offer any alternative to shipping my camera off for another 6-week repair — hardly an attractive option when it means missing a record of my baby’s early days. I figured that if they couldn’t offer a credit towards a new camera, they could at least provide a loaner during their ridiculously slow repair process — but the company insists that my only option is to ship off the camera and miss the next six weeks of my baby’s early life.
I’ve learned my extended warranty lesson, at least as far as VAC is concerned. The extended warranty doesn’t save hassle — it makes hassle. Far better to save the dollars up front and apply it towards replacing the camera when it blows — which is what we would have done eight weeks ago, and which would only have shortened our replacement cycle by a few months.
The good news is that VAC doesn’t have a lock on extended warranty programs. They may provide the warranties for companies like London Drugs and JC Penney, but they DON’T provide the warranties for the Future Shop, Best Buy, or Staples — all good alternatives for buying our next camera.