No, we are not going to be talking about one of my favorite childhood games, though I am sure I could relive quite a few good memories about “Freeze Tag” and countless other varieties. Tags are seemingly ‘it’ these days. For a while in late 2005, it seemed that every startup taking funding out here in Silicon Valley had something to do with tags, or at least there business plan said they did.

As we dive into the conversation for Beyond Blogging 2006, we thought it important to spend a few days making sure we are all on the same page in regards to some of the basic concepts we will be discussing and building upon. For me personally, tags are perhaps one of the most important aspects of this thing many call Web 2.0 and the most important facet of social media. So what are tags anyways and how do we make use of them?

Simply put, tags are very nearly identical to keywords or phrases, but they are used in a much more powerful way. OK, that is a good start, but from here it gets more complicated if you let it - so rather than getting too deep in the philosophical discussions or the vagaries of explaining their potential impact, lets focus on some practical applications of tags for communications professionals. In this regard, there are two important uses of tags, tagging of web pages within social bookmarking services like Delicious and tagging of blog posts by the blog author.

Social Bookmarking: Tags as a means of organizing and finding

You may notice that we include a link at the end of every post called “Add to Delicious”. For those of you unfamiliar, Delicious is a Web site where you can save Web pages for later retrieval. Rather than saving it to your browser on your hard drive, you save a link to the page on the network where you can access it later from anywhere in the world. Unlike your IE Favorites though, these links are generally saved ‘publicly’ for other’s to discover. Hence the ’social’ part of social bookmarking.

What makes Delicious (and many of the other services) wildly popular with so many people is its implementation of tagging. Rather than trying to save each item within a folder, people can ‘tag’ the page with relevant keywords and/or unique tags. For instance, if you wanted to save this blog post for later, you might want to add it to your Delicious account and tag it “BeyondBlogging“, “Beyond Blogging”, “Tags”, “Tagging” and perhaps “BeyondBlogging:tags“. This is a different way of organizing the Web pages you visit - rather than being a hierarchically based structure, it is an unstructured system which makes it more flexible and usable.

Tags plus public bookmarks that are shared gives us insight into the wisdom of crowds. So if for instance, we wanted to see what Web pages other people have tagged with “folksonomy“, or even “tags” we have a new way of discovering what other people are thinking and how they are classifying content.

Bottom line, if we want people who use these systems to discover interesting and relevant content, we should start by tagging it ourselves, as I have done with this article.

For those of you wishing to dig deeper into this subject, the April 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine has a great overview of Social Bookmarking tools. A generally current list of the more known tools is available from Wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: Tags as a means of promotion, discovery and community

As with the example of social bookmarking, Technorati Tags are also about the idea of someone tagging a piece of content and someone else being able to more easily search for it. Unlike the social bookmarking use of tagging though, Technorati Tags are ways that Blog authors are able to add tags to their blog posts. In a sense this is how an author is able to let those people interested in a particular topic know that they have something to say about it.

Blog search engines like Technorati, IceRocket, and BlogDigger leverage the tags within the blog posts to enable people to find out what people have had to say about a given topic most recently. Services like PubSub enable you to subscribe to receive alerts when people write something new about a topic. Communications professionals need to use tags for the purpose of promoting a given piece of news to its intended audiences as well as for monitoring what is being said around a given topic of interest.

It is exactly those people who watch what is being said about a given topic of interest, via the tags for that topic, which forms a community. Another interesting way to think of tags is as the ‘glue’ that holds the conversation on a given topic together. The tag for “Web 2.0” for instance is almost always one of the hottest out there. There are numerous experts, analysts, students and lay people who care about what people have to say about Web 2.0, and the tag is an important element of what holds the community together.

For those of you wishing to dig deeper into Technorati Tags, the blog “A Consumning Experience” has a great introduction. The best way is to jump into Technorati’s Tags and see how people tag things for yourself.

So much more…

Tags are such an important part of the fabric that weaves the Web 2.0, I could not possibly do the subject justice in one post - especially in trying to keep this somewhat short. Beyond tags, there are tagclouds (aka Heat Maps) which let you see the most popular tags in a given cluster. And there really is so much more…

But rather than go too deep here, let’s check in with a few questions and see what is on your mind. What do you think of tags? What questions do you have? How might you use tags to your advantage professionally? What are some important issues that should be added to this primer?

[Disclaimer: Tagging is not something to be done lightly on behalf of a client, nor is it to be done excessively. This introduction to the topic gives you enough knowledge to be dangerous, so let’s take a breath and not be dangerous. Tags must be honest and accurate. In this case, less is truly more - using every word in the english language to reach a wider audience will not only be ineffective, it can be downright damaging to the interests of your clients. There is a great danger of ‘tagspam’ which has already become a bit of a menace, polluting the valuable tagstream with inappropriate material. If this trend continues, a truly valuable service will lose its value.]

Tech Tags: BeyondBlogging Tags Tagging BeyondBlogging:tags

Categories: Tags