An explanation of tags… but not by me! After I worried about WordPress 2.3 and tags earlier today, Michael Martin came to the rescue with his guest post on ProBlogger on using categories and tags effectively.
The important things about tags appear to be that you should use as many as you like, as long as there is consistency. So, if I were to tag this post with the tag “tags”, and tag a follow up post on the same topic with the tag “tagging” I would not be using tags effectively (though I may end up with some sort of record for most use of the word tag in a sentence).
Michael also says that “To a certain extent, they [tags] could be used to replace searching.” Further to my example above, if I was looking for information on tags, it would be incredibly easy to click on a tag which read “tags”, almost easier than searching. For someone trying to find everything on a blog or site about a certain topic, tags make life easier.
This idea of searching reminded me of a post at Read/Write Web on social bookmarking I read the other day. This forwarded me to Richard MacManus’ post on the future of del.icio.us (or Delicious as the current beta is called).
Michael’s comment on searching lead me to agree with Richard’s post. Delicious is not only a mine of information, it’s full of hundreds of thousands of recommendations from thousands of users, but it has the backing of Yahoo! and the ability to innovate and use this information to come up with a powerful social search tool. The special point being that the recommendations are already in the system, unlike most other social search startups.
Social bookmarking, tagging, votes and recommendations. We use them to keep ourselves and our blogs in order. Soon we could be using them to search, maybe even replace Google. Can human recommendation out do computer algorithm? Is it possible to beat the breadth of search engine bots with the best of the web from a crowd’s impression? Will I ever get the hang of tagging myself?
It was big last year socially, this year WordPress introduces it as standard, what will happen to tagging next year? Is last year’s next big thing, next year’s next big thing?
6 Responses for "Tags And Categories Explained (And The Future Of del.icio.us)"
Thanks for the link Phil. Glad you found the article useful.
I agree that tagging could hold a lot of promise, but one problem with them is that they’re almost too easy to set up. Some people add a tagging plugin, and just fires tags at each post they write. There needs to be a little more thought behind them, otherwise they aren’t going to be so useful.
Hi Michael, thanks for stopping by.
I can’t agree that it’s too easy though. Even if you start off by firing random tags at posts you will surely start to learn and over the longer term, everyone’s tags will eventually make the whole Internet more ordered and possibly cause an improvement in search, the likes of which Delicious are seemingly heading towards.
Maybe there will be a great confused period while everybody gets used to tags now they are standard in WordPress, but I think we can look forward to a better blogosphere in the future.
It’s harder to stay consistent than you might imagine, though.
Hey Laura, again, as I’ve said above, I think practice will make it easier. When you start out tagging it will be like throwing random words in the pot. But, as you do it more and more you should find that it becomes more natural and that you will probably get to know the tags that you use.
Let’s hope so anyway!
On the whole, I do agree that tagging will be a good thing, but on individual blogs, it’s only useful when it’s done well.
There’s a little more to it than just firing a tag cloud code in your sidebar template. Good tags are purpose picked for the user.
It’s a good thing you got your message out to the numerous bloggers that read ProBlogger then! I’ll certainly be thinking of the people who will use my tags when I come to implement them.
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