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
Make your nonprofit more effective with RSS aggregation
.28.10 | 2 Comments »
October 28th, 2005 by Alex
TechSoup invited me to be part of their online event on Web 2.0 this week. Since I was on call for a discussion about social bookmarking and aggregation, I put together a short overview of how aggregation can help nonprofits, and another on how social bookmarking can help nonprofits.
Here’s my quick take on three crucial ways that nonprofits can use RSS and aggregation to work more effectively:
- Automatically populate websites with up-to-date content: It’s very expensive to create original content on a regular basis. If you set up a series of RSS feeds on a particular topic that can pump useful content onto your organization’s web site; you’re adding value to that content by selecting a particular combination of topics and sources. For example, an organization that advocates for women with HIV might create an RSS-driven news section on its web site that pulls relevant web resources from del.icio.us, photos from Flickr, and blog posts from Technorati (a bit tricky to set up as a RSS feed, but doable; the trick is to set up the search as a “watchlist”, and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the watchlist.)
- Create a media monitoring site: You can create a media monitoring tool for internal use only. Something as simple as a Bloglines account can become a clearinghouse for information that helps with your work. That can include RSS feeds for Google or Yahoo news searches on particular search terms; del.icio.us feeds for resources related to your work; or news feeds for major publications in your field.
I’d figure that most nonprofits would benefit from setting up a media monitoring site with RSS feeds that cover the following:
- Search of major news feeds (try Google News or Yahoo News) for the name of your organization, acronym (if any), major sub-brands/projects, and/or name of your organization’s President/E.D.
- Search of major news feeds for keywords on the issues you need to track. Play with the search terms until you get the right volume of news; if you’re an organization that works on a major policy area (e.g. healthcare) you may need to narrow down your search until it gives you a manageable amount of news [e.g. “healthcare policy (Congress or President)”].
- Search of blogs (using Technorati or Feedster) for your organization and name of your organization’s President/E.D.
- Search of blogs for your issue keywords.
- del.icio.us, Furl & Flickr tag pages for your organization’s name and key issue areas. Don’t forget that del.icio.us lets you set up feeds that are narrowed down by using multiple tags (e.g. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/healthcare+policy)
- del.icio.us, Furl & blog (Technorati/Feedster) search on your chosen team tag (see below)
- For a local organization, search feeds that search your issue keywords within the news feeds for all your major local papers and broadcast outlets (you can set up a Bloglines account that includes all your local media, then set up a keyword search that searches all the feeds in your account; then set up a second Bloglines account as your main media monitoring site, and subscribe to the keyword search from the first account).
- Choose a team tag: Choose a tag that your staff, board and volunteers can use to share information and resources. Encourage your team to use del.icio.us, furl or another social bookmarking service to save web resources they find personally useful or want to share with the team. Encourage bloggers to use that tag on any post they want team members to read. And then make sure your team monitors the tag regularly by visiting your media monitoring site, or adding the RSS feed for the tag (from del.icio.us, Furl and Technorati) to their personal home pages in Google.
I hope this is helpful. Tips on how nonprofits can use social bookmarking will follow shortly.
Aggregation as an endless loop
.10.10 | 1 Comment »
October 10th, 2005 by Alex
Here’s a challenge for wiser RSS-wranglers than I: as aggregation becomes a more widely used tool for populating web sites, how do we prevent RSS feeds from being cluttered with multiple identical posts?
I was just looking at the Technorati tag page for net2, where a couple of my Net2-related posts have each appeared twice. That’s because my blog is being aggregated in full at Web of Blogs, an aggregation set up for the Web of Change conference. Once I get my Social Signal aggregator up and running, that may provide another duplicate of many of my blog posts.
It would be great if Technorati, Feedster & other searches could recognize true duplicate posts, and only show them once — or if there were a way to strip duplicate posts out of a feed when aggregating onto another site (for example, NetSquared’s aggregator page.)
Latest project: TechSoup/CompuMentor
.19.9 | No Comments »
September 19th, 2005 by Alex
My latest venture in the fabulous world of Web 2.0 is helping CompuMentor — home of TechSoup — set up an online community in conjunction with an event they are organizing for next spring. Job one? Use this post to check whether the aggregation is working.
What Google blog search doesn’t have
.14.9 | 1 Comment »
September 14th, 2005 by Alex
Rob highlights its pros and cons. How could he forget to mention its gravest oversight: no rankings! Or is this a desperate hope that the ascendance of Google could change the domestic balance of power?
Speed feeding
.22.8 | 4 Comments »
August 22nd, 2005 by Alex
Part of the plan with the telecentre.org ecosystem is to bring relevant content into telecentre.org sites using RSS. In the case of event sites — like the Capetown site that is the very first telecentre event site to get up and running — we’ll use special tags (keywords) to help create our event blogs. That way people who already have their own blogs or web sites can post stories on their own blogs, but have the stories show up on the event site, too.
The challenge is figuring out how to gather all those blog posts together in a way that brings them onto the event site in something close to real time. In other words, how quickly can we move a blog post from a personal site to an event site?
I tested that out today with my first cross-post to the Capetown site. I wrote my post, then included the tag capetowntelecentre, which is the keyword we designated as our “flag this for syndication on the Capetown site” signal.
Next step was to check in — about half an hour later — with the various blog search services that could help us aggregate all these blog posts into a single RSS feed. I had already set up a PubSub search on capetowntelecentre, because PubSub only starts searching for terms once you set up a search; but my PubSub feed hadn’t found my post yet (six hours later, it still hasn’t; nor has it found the test post Rob wrote last night!).
Then I tried Technorati. Technorati had a feed for posts that contained the word capetowntelecentre (where I found my test post), and it had a feed for posts that used capetowntelecentre as a tag (where I found Rob’s post, but not mine, even though I used capetowntelecentre both as a tag and in text. Ah, the enigma that is Technorati.)
Next stop: Feedster, where a chorus of RSS angels opened their throats and spilled forth the whole universe of (two) posts containing the term capetowntelecentre (interesting, pulling mine in indirectly via the Web of Blogs site set up for the upcoming Web of Change conference.) I had a winner! Up went our shiny new RSS feed for capetowntelecentre, which the kind folks at Feedster were good enough to set up (on request) as an ad-free RSS feed, because they thought it was “just the right thing to do” for a “good cause” like telecentre.org.
One more note: Mark tried a test post too, but since he put capetowntelecentre in quotation marks, it didn’t get aggregated; it’s worth noting that you have to avoid quotation marks to make this kind of tag-based aggregation work.
My kingdom for a link*
.9.8 | 1 Comment »
August 9th, 2005 by Alex
Rob thinks my new comment form is lame and desperate. I say, maybe he would reassert some claim to even participating in our rank war if he actually deployed a little strategy himself.
As any politician knows, you’ve got to ask people for their vote. And any salesperson knows you’ve got to ask your prospect for that sale. So I figure, you’ve got to ask your blog’s readers for that link.
*Note: Actual kingdom may be smaller than it appears. Offer void in Hawaii and Alaska.
Powerblogher questions: on tagging, bookmarking and wikis
.8.8 | 3 Comments »
August 8th, 2005 by Alex
Debra Roby, one of the folks at our powerbloghers session, blogged & emailed with these questions:
- Tagging. why should I care? and how do I do it?
- Social bookmarking. same question.
- Setting up a wiki?? Where, why and most importantly how??
Let me tackle each one in turn:
Tagging. Why should I care? and how do I do it?
I can’t resist the urge to refer tagging newbies to my article for the Toronto Star, which was meant to give people an overview of the why and hows of tagging. But let me also try for an abridged version.
Tagging is the ability to assign topical keywords to a wide range of digital content, like photos, bookmarks (favourite web sites) and blog posts. It matters because:
- Just like the Internet itself, it’s self-governing. Nobody’s choice of tag is the correct, authoritative tag for a given page or piece of content; everybody gets to choose for herself what word or words will help her find a piece of content again. Finally, information architecture that matches the structure and spirit of the Net!
- Tags are non-hierarchical: unlike the frequently-seen system of nested categories or nested folders (for example, “animals” is a category and “dogs” is a subcategory), tagging treats all topics as equal — so you can have associations among different tags without having one be “above” the other. In a related point…
- Tags are non-exclusive: you don’t have to choose which tag to use. So if you find a great piece of software to connect your Mac and your Treo (to take a hypothetical example) you can tag it “Mac” and “Treo” and “software”.
- Tags enable collaboration. The same tag that helps you find that Treo software can help everybody else find it too. Cool, huh?
- Tags make us into better human beings. Really. Because while I’m saving that Treo link it occurs to me that other people might think to look for it under “Palm”, so what the hell, I might as well save it with the tag “Palm”, too. How generous of me! Aren’t I nice person!
But that takes us to the “how” part. Basically the three most obvious ways to use tags are:
- To store, retrieve or share favourite web links (bookmarks). del.icio.us was the first service to offer tag-based bookmarking, but there are others — see my comments on social bookmarking, below.
- To organize, retrieve or share your photos. The big player in the photo-tagging world is Flickr.
- To organize or find blog posts. For now that pretty much relies on using Technorati to aggregate blog posts that share the same tag. For example, you can include the code:
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/powerbloghers” rel=”tag”>powerbloghers</a>
to include a post on the Technorati page for powerbloghers.
That last point brings us to the BIG “so what” of tagging: it allows for the distribution and aggregation of content via RSS. If you think of RSS feeds as structured web traffic, then tags are the road signs. Tags tell RSS feeds where to appear on web pages that are structured around RSS — pages like our Blogher Advanced Tools page. There’s no “real” content on that page — nothing that was posted directly to the blog. There are just a bunch of road signs that say “woohoo! over here!” whenever the tag “powerblogher” passes by in an RSS feed.
For more insights into the Meaning of Tags, check out You’re It.
Social bookmarking. same question.
Bottom line: social bookmarking sytems help you organize the web sites you want to find again in a way that makes it easy for you to find them. Unlike the “favorites” folders built into your web browser, using a social bookmarking system means you’ll be able to access your favourite web links from any computer with an Internet connection. And the same effort lets you share your links with other people who share your interest, find resources that they have recommended, and even turn your bookmarks into a great source of constantly updated content on your web page or blog.
For a great list of social bookmarking services and related resources, see Marnie Webb’s social bookmarking H20 playlist (H20 Playlist is a kind of social bookmarking system itself).
Setting up a wiki?? Where, why and most importantly how??
Wikis are web pages that people can edit collaboratively. Some uses for wikis include:
- Writing a document with a group of people or getting input/changes to a document you’ve written. Larry Lessig is revising a whole book this way.
- Taking notes on an event as a group, so that everyone shares the job of creating minutes and an event record. That’s how the folks at Aspiration use PurpleWiki, one wiki software tool.
- To organize your own notes in way that is easy, freeflowing and interlinked. Kris Krug put me onto TiddlyWiki, and a couple of comments on my recent blog post about switching from Entourage recommended VoodooPad, which I’m now trying out.
It seems like in the big world of social software there are Blog People and Wiki People. We may sometimes end up at the same conferences and we may even have interesting conversations about tagging, but if we mate we produce mutant offspring. (Nominees, anyone?)
I am afraid that I am a Blog Person — though I have great respect and affection for many Wiki People. So while I can tell you what I use for my own current, occasional wiki needs (Jotspot), I must defer wiki wisdom-seekers to people I know who are true WikiHeads.
If this were a wiki, WikiHeads would now be a hyperlink, waiting to be populated with an ever-growing list of fascinating Wiki People. But this is just a blog, so all I can do is encourage one of the Wiki People to start their own wiki of useful wiki links, and meanwhile point you towards Nancy White’s fabulous set of wiki resources.
I hope this is helpful to Debra and others — and that others will chime in with their own explanations and resources by using the powerbloghers tag.
Powerbloghers, please stand up
.8.8 | 1 Comment »
August 8th, 2005 by Alex
Last weekend I presented an Advanced Tools session at Blogher, which didn’t work out exactly as planned since we lost our Internet connection in minute 2 of the session. But the very generous and eager crowd bore with our reversion to flipcharts, and we made it through and I think helped folks get their minds around some of the possibilities of integrating RSS, tags, Flickr and del.icio.us into their blogging workflow.
We promised to follow up by posting some additional resources to our Advanced Tools session web page. We were going to demonstrate how you could add resources to the page via tags and RSS; our Internet outage meant that didn’t happen in the moment, but I’m going to keep to that vision by posting some additional resources via my own blog. That’s right, folks — if you’re reading this on the Advanced Tools page, you’ll be thrilled and amazed to discover that it got their automagically thanks to RSS plus this tag: powerbloghers. If you’re not reading this on the Advanced Tools page, please note that all you need to do in order to contribute your power blogging tips and links to the world of fabulous blogging women is to use the tag “powerbloghers” on del.icio.us, or include this bit of code in a blog post:
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/powerbloghers” rel=”tag”>powerbloghers</a>
My introduction to tagging and social bookmarking
My introduction to using an RSS newsreader — a great tool for subscribing to del.icio.us tags as well as other news and information sources
My blog posts about using del.icio.us
For more notes on choosing tags see my blog post
To really geek out on issues around tagsonomies, “folksonomies”, and tag selection, check out this blog (full disclosure: I’m on this blog too):
http://www.tagsonomy.com
And for event more del.icio.us-ness, see:
Tools that make del.icio.us even more life-altering
The del.icio.us tag page on del.icio.us — tons of resources!
The demise of Technorati politics?
.24.6 | No Comments »
June 24th, 2005 by Alex
What’s missing from the new and improved Technorati? It seems as if their overview ofpopular blog conversations still includes movies, books, and the top 100 — but where is their politics page?
Until the redesign, Technorati was home to a nifty slice of political debate on the blogosphere, organized by “conservative” “liberal” and “other”. It was one of the few places where you knew you could find blog comments that didn’t fall into Republican or Democrat camps, because that middle category was explicitly an “in between” group. Anyone where how to find it, or how we can get it back?
100 blog shakers
.21.6 | No Comments »
June 21st, 2005 by Alex
I suspect that the AO/Technorati Open Media 100 will be the meme of the day. It’s a list of 100 movers & shakers in the world of open media — the world of bloggers, social networks, and social software. For the most part the list includes the people I would hope to see there, although one could quibble endlessly over the influential and insightful bloggers who should have been there but aren’t.
But the one oversight I just can’t leave unremarked is the list of toolsmiths, which really ought to include the Robot Coop team behind 43 Things.