well it seems the pressure is mounting on tags. i have subscribed to technorati and am no 3 in the emerging church tag stakes and no 1 in the alternative worship tag stakes at the moment! andrew jones has a post enthusing about tagging for 2006 whilst jordon is more ambivalent (though he still tags). here are my issues:
1. i’ll do it if it’s easy! i have subscribed to technorati which immediately gives me an option of 20 general tags – easy – i’ll do that…
but adding tags to every post manually seems a chore. i do use ecto though and that provides an easy way of tagging. the only issue for me is that i don’t always use ecto – i prefer to manipulate the code and images in typepad itself. so i think the easy route may mean i tag some posts if it seems important and i’ll use ecto for those… this is my first post with tags via ecto. i’ll see if it works. can i be bothered to go back through my blog posts and tag them? i doubt it…
2. i enthused about del.iciou.us a while back and have since been using it as a way of bookmarking via tags. it is so simple and that is the beauty of it. everyone should sign up and use it. i confess my use of it has been pretty lame – see my tags here, but it will grow in 2006 and i’ll start to use the inbox feature
3. flickr is my big new discovery (ok i know i am behind many of you on this). flickr is a free online photo album piece of software. i’ll blog about it separately in terms of why i love it. but where it comes into play with tagging is that you can tag any photos you like. once a lot of users are doing this it becomes a very neat way of finding photos of your own (e.g. with a place name or person’s name). to give an example punters at greenbelt could tag their photos with greenbelt festival. then in flickr you can do a search on that tag and find everyone who has photos… – fab eh!
4. my big question is how this will all cohere? i love typepad photo albums – in an ideal world there should be one code for tagging so that i could tag my photos there and not just in flickr and one way of searching images (incidentally i have asked typepad if there are plans to develop tagging as part of the service). for example i had photos of greenbelt but not in flickr so someone looking via tags would not have found me. now maybe something like google image search will head this way? but i am way out of my league here. i’ve no idea where it is all headed. will tagging develop more coherence or am i missing something?
5. is tagging a fad or will it be a long term way of organising data on the web? i.e. are we wasting our time worrying about it? blogs seem to feature pretty well in search engines already which is the way most people search for stuff. what is tagging adding that will last?
if all this is putting you off blogs and blogging then just ignore it. but do try out at least one new thing. it’s good to learn and push new avenues once in a while. it’s no big deal though. as jordon says at the end of his post:
Basically what I am saying is that while tags are useful, I wouldn’t get stressed out if you don’t have them. I don’t think they make big difference in most weblogs.
update: i received this reply from typepad to my query about tagging:
TypePad doesn’t have a built in tagging system currently but that is a feature we’ll be looking to add as part of a future release.
Technorati Tags: applications, blogs, flickr, technorati, tag, del.icio.us
You can just use the categories in Typepad to get started with tagging. Technorati recognizes these as tags.
ahhh – that’s useful to know…
Talking of this sort of stuff, you might like to sign up for London Bloggers (http://londonbloggers.iamcal.com).
Just a nice idea, and requires no work… but links to other local blogs by Tube station.
Hope you’ve had a good one.
Doh! I’ve been bumped from 9th on Technorati’s “emerging church” down to 12th! Oh the humanity! Guess I’ll have to work harder to get linked!
Peace,
Jamie
Jonny, I have just started using Technorati… slow on the uptake I know! and use the categories on typepad as mentioned by Johannes… but… have been wondering about using Echo for a while… any good? why use it over typepads own interface?
ecto is a very cheap and simple programme – a must for blogging. the reason it’s so good is that you can write your posts remotely. then when online just click publish and it will post direct to your blog. fantastic for those meetings, train journeys, conferences etc…
the tagging is a bonus…
As you say, many blogs are well indexed by the search engines, but what is really missing from most of the search tools available today is any understanding of semantics or any “intelligent” ability to find what a web-accessible document is “about.” Tags provide a loose, bottom-up way of giving some indication of what a blog or a post (or any other snippet of media, for that matter) is about and so provide a bit more structure.
We actually encouraged people at Greenbelt to tag their photos with ‘greenbelt2005’ (to provide space for future years) and you can find over 1100 photos on flickr with that tag. I wrote some scripts that then pulled together blog entries that linked to Greenbelt or were tagged greenbelt2005, and those photos, and provided an ongoing aggregation of those during and immediately after the festival. It’s offline at the moment, but I’m hoping to get it back up as time allows. When that happens it’ll be at http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/festival/2005/collage/
As I see it, tagging is part of an ongoing process as we learn to share rich data and provide equally rich meta-data to describe it, so that people can mix and match content to build up something more. It’s the same process as the google maps mashups that have taken off this year, and a number of other experiments, tricks and services that follow in that fashion. Tagging doesn’t provide everything we need for a really semantically rich web, but it’s a useful addition.
James, what I think you are looking for is called the Semantic Web, this is the next great project for Tim Berners-Lee. A definition and links for the SW can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web.
Tim has also just started blogging and his blog can be found at http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/, but his stuff goes over my head pretty quickly…..
Thanks Richard. I’m well aware of the Semantic Web project and working on various SemWeb related projects, but didn’t want to dig into all of that here and drag everything too far from Jonny’s original entry.