{"id":2228,"date":"2006-02-27T00:22:25","date_gmt":"2006-02-26T13:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/?p=2228"},"modified":"2006-02-25T20:26:59","modified_gmt":"2006-02-25T09:26:59","slug":"tag-youre-it-leveraging-tagging-for-your-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/tag-youre-it-leveraging-tagging-for-your-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Tag, You’re It! Leveraging Tagging For Your Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>The following post was submitted by for the <\/em>Blogging for Beginners Series<\/a><\/em> by Aaron Brazell. Aaron is a major contributer over at b5 (he is a major player in keeping our servers in order) and writes on numerous blogs including <\/em>Emerging Earth<\/a> and Technosailor.com<\/a>. I asked Aaron to write an introduction to Tagging. Here’s what he has to say on the topic:<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was a kid, playing tag was a big thing. Everyone would run around the yard trying to avoid the person who was “it” so they wouldn’t become “it”. Eeny, meeny, miney, mo – who would be tagged next?\n<\/p>\n

\nIf you’ve been around social networking, or many of the next-generation web services out there (such as del.icio.us<\/a> or digg<\/a>) then you certainly know what tags are. They are really just labels. This is an article. It is about corn. We will tag it “corn”.\n<\/p>\n

\nLike these services (and others!), blogs can utilize tags as well. The argument surrounding blog tags usually swirl around the similarity of tags to categories but there are some key conceptual differences that make them different.<\/p>\n

Categories are structured; Tags are unstructured<\/em><\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\nThe main difference between categories and tags is the way they organize content. Categories use the “tree” style concept that is probably the easiest to envision. You may have a series of categories such as “News”, “Music”, “Tech” with subcategories nested under those categories. The News category might have subcategories like “Politics”, “Main Stream Media”, and “Iraq” and the Music category might have subcategories like “Melbourne Bands” or “CD Reviews”.\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nIn this way, content is organized in a structural<\/em> way. Every entry has a bucket to go in and in this way, content can be easily maintained.\n<\/p>\n

\nHowever, tagging provides more of a granular<\/em> way of organizing content and it follows more of a “brain storage” approach. You might ask what I mean by “brain storage”. Let me explain.\n<\/p>\n

\nIf you step away from every day conversation and attempt to take a birds-eye view of normal every-day human interaction, you’ll notice a haphazard flow that tends to jump between topics, conversations, participants, etc. Rarely does a conversation follow a simple linear flow outside of email threads. If a blog is a reflection of the life of the blogger (and it should be, if it is authentic!), then the context of conversation will be non-linear as well.\n<\/p>\n

\nAnd while this is a good idea when I write about it here, the application of that concept is far from simple. Blogs are, by nature, linear animals. They string together entries in chronological order with comments left in chronological order and fall into a far-too simplistic model of “this entry is about this, and that entry is about that” when in fact, that is a mischaracterization of how human interaction really is!<\/em><\/p>\n

Case Study<\/em><\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\nAbout six months ago, I started taking a look under the hood of my blog. I noticed I had tons of content that was old and was lost in the shuffle of posting new entries and constant UI changes. I would look at my stats and see Google traffic to older posts but blog readers could not quickly find old content. I wondered how I could keep that quickly accessible to my daily readers as well as the search engines. I began to dive into the concept of tagging.\n<\/p>\n

\nAs I attempted to answer that question for myself, I came up with a couple of common counter-arguments to tagging.\n<\/p>\n