One of the greatest things about tags is how we can use them expressly for sharing information with others. When we add tags to our blog posts, or tag a given Web page within a social bookmarking service like Delicious, we are not only helping ourselves refind that information later, we are engaging in conversation with other people who have an interest in the same tags and topics. The community that forms around a tag for conversation can have an ongoing topical focus as with Web2.0 or it can be focused on an organization as with the non-profit I started called BrainJams or focused on a specific product like the iPod.

Tags are also very powerfully used for promoting an event and for starting conversations around the event. Promoting the event is done by tagging the blog posts and Web pages about an event so that people within the existing topical communities can be made aware of it. If they have an interest, they may also tag it, or they may Digg it or even better, they may blog about it and the word of mouth momentum begins organically. The best way to hold the conversation together around an event is by having a single tag that everyone uses when talking about the event, so communicating that tag to participants is a very important part of the event planning.

The tag we are using for this event is BeyondBlogging.

In addition to using the event tag to focus what people are saying about the event, it is most helpful to use the tag for identifying what event participants (aka attendees) wish to discuss at the event. So let’s try an experiment with each other. If you already have an account on Delicious, you are all set - if you don’t, would you please consider registering for one. After that, I recommend that you follow their instructions for adding the ‘post to Delicious’ buttons/links to your browser as they suggest. Once this is done, you are ready to roll and contribute to our conversation for Beyond Blogging 2006.

Next time you are reading something informative online that might be appropriate for us to discuss at the event, you can click the Post to Delicious button you just installed on your browser and add the tag BeyondBlogging (no spaces) and other tags you feel are appropriate. As you do so, everyone (such as myself and the panelists) who is following that tag will get to benefit from your efforts to filter the best content into our discussion. Together, we can build quite a library of resources for the Beyond Blogging 2006 discussion. We will also share a common understanding of the issues by having read the same Web pages, which can do wonders for advancing the discussion at the event.

As you can imagine, there are many ways tags can be used to foster collaboration and to promote ideas into a conversation, but there are also more direct and personal uses of tags. With Delicious for instance, you can actually tag a given page for an individual user. So if you are working with someone who has a Delicious account (like me) and you want to share something with them, you can tag it for:username and it will show up in a special ‘inbox’ where the person can view it. So if there is something you want to share with me to read or consider writing about, tag it for:chrisheuer and I will see it. This works extremely well for getting the attention of a specific person or perhaps for making sure that the people working on a project with you are all on the same page.

While there are many other uses for tags (such as TagSpaces like BeyondBlogging:Tags) and many other contexts in which event tags are important (such as within a photo sharing community like Flickr), I believe this post together with the Tag You’re It post from yesterday covers the basics. Tags are really the fundamental building blocks of social media, so I would really like to hear back from you on this topic. If you have any questions or want to clarify what I have written here, let’s start a conversation using the comments feature on this site. This conversation, and this event, will only be as useful to you as the amount of participation you put into it. This is your golden opportunity to prepare for the future of Communications today - don’t miss it!

One other note about Del.icio.us. You may be wondering what’s up with those dots? Quite simply, most of the good domain names are taken, so a couple of years ago, people started getting creative with their naming. Delicious saw an opportunity with the .us domain and the took it. Personally, I don’t bother with the dots in between when I reference the site since they were able to buy the delicious.com domain once they received venture funding. It had gotten so bad in the fall of 2005 that the dots in the name schema ‘jumped the shark’ and Supr.c.ilio.us launched as the Web 2.0 Snarks to spoof all of the Super Silly things that were going on. (I still can’t get to the site by just entering the name directly, and that is kind of the point)

Categories: Tags