Tagging, Tracking…and what’s this structured blogging?: - Charlene Li & Marnie Webb

Why should you care about tagging?

  • Collecting and organising your own information on services like del.icio.us
  • Makes you discoverable
  • Find like minded people interested in the same topics on services like Technorati - this encourages serendipity
  • Share your posts and Links with a community - ongoing dialogue
  • Tracking conversations - use RSS, or subscribe to a tag feed

Qn - are there any questions about dealing with synonyms? Hardcore tagging experts would say no - let people use the words they like

Qn - are all keywords tags .. and all tags not keywords? Whats the difference between keywords and tags? Marc says - in principle they are the same. Keywords are outdated, oldfashioned. Marnie Webb suggests - the context of tagging is most frequently social and the context of keywords is more individual. Also talks of a neat tool that searches different services for a common tag - here’s the result on the BlogHer tag on TagFetch.

Charlene on Furl - “my web filing cabinet” - saves a complete copy of the web page - so even if the url changes - have my own personal copy and it enables full text search. Also categories help manage the content - my metadata - and I can decide what is public and what is private.

Marnie on del.icio.us - likes it for serendipity, binds blog to a loosely-knit community of bloggers. On Furl can’t tag-hop - i.e. ask to see posts from others that use that tag.

The Problem? Blogs/Web pages contain valuable information that isn’t organized. Structured blogging and microformats provide structure to put blog posts into searchable databases.

Microformats - why bother? Your blog content appears on other sites - use it in mash-ups. Some sites that use microformats - meetup, yahoo!local, edgeio - classifieds, Judy’s book - reviews. How to create posts with microformats - use hReview creater to generate code and copy/paste text. Not recommended. Use Plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type. Googlebase. Its all just starting now - implications on who owns the data etc. We’re moving beyond blogging into structured blogging - which will be an umbrella that will support all microformats.

Resources for this workshop are at TaggingBlogher.