4 ways your computer can help you to protect your time

Feel like email and social media are stealing your time? Great news: your communications technologies can give time back, too.  I’m not talking about productivity boosters or clever ways of getting even more work done in even less time. I’m talking about...

Tagging for world domination

Tags can help you drive traffic to your website and build engagement in your online community. Here are my secrets to tagging success.

About this site

As you’re poking around the Social Signal web site, you might notice the cluster of red words in the right-hand sidebar. This cluster is called a "tag cloud". It represents all the tags that we use on this site: the keywords that we’ve assigned to different pages or blog posts to indicate what each story is about.

Our tag cloud is a visual representation of the range of content on the site. The tags that appear in the biggest letters are the tags that we write about a lot (like "SocialSignal" or "SocialBookmarking"). The smaller tags (like "blogher" and "workshops") link to topics that we’ve only written about once or twice.

You can click on any tag to see all the stories we’ve written about that topic — so the tag cloud is a handy way to navigate the site, as well as a quick picture of what we’re thinking about.

We decided to use a tag cloud as one of the main ways to navigate our site because tags are so central to the kind of work we do. For many of the projects we work on — especially web projects that build online communities by linking multiple web sites — tags are central to how information is organized, circulated, and discovered.

We think tagging is one of the most exciting ways for people to work together online. We hope that our tag cloud will be a fun way for you to explore how tagging works as a way to organize and link information thematically. And we hope you’ll use our tag cloud to learn more about tags and about tag-enabled services like social bookmarking and del.icio.us.

 

Powerblogher questions: on tagging, bookmarking and wikis

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...

Powerbloghers, please stand up

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...

PowerBloghers get ready to roll

We’re going to show folks a few tricks that can help them make beautiful, earth-changing blogs while they sleep. So please bring us your powerblogging questions — visit http://advancedtools.blogspot.com.

Wanted: RSS calendaring

At the top of my wishlist: a good RSS calendaring tool that would let me share my whereabouts with friends, family and well-wishers. (If anyone has a technology that can specifically exclude ill-wishers, so much the better.) The absolute minimum that I need is...

Amping up for BlogHer

I’m not just the t-shirt girl: I’m going to be live and in person at BlogHer this weekend, facilitating a fantabulous advanced tools session with Marnie Webb and George Oates. Marnie has set up an Advanced Tools blog just for our session. We hope that...