Library clips

Inspired by The Community Engine blog and one of my earlier posts, I’m keen to add tags to my blog as well as having categories…the tags would act as subject terms.

I’m doing this as my categories aren’t as effective for retrieval as they were in the beginning, as my content is now increasing, and I don’t want to add to my list of categories as it takes up too much space (and I can’t get it to work as a drop-down menu).

Although I’m finding Google as an excellent tool to find my blog posts
eg. gataga inurl:libraryclips.blogsome.com
(I find I can leave out the blogsome.com bit and it is still precise, I don’t even really have to use the inurl: bit most of the time - this depends on the ambiguity of your blog name).

At the moment Google has indexed a post that is 4 days old, so I have 3 days of my latest posts that are not indexed by Google yet
(I guess that’s where pinging an RSS/Blog engine, and the World Live Web come to play…but at the same time, having the Google toolbar installed makes it so easy to search anything).

Anyway, I want my categories to be broad headings, and my tags to be specific subject terms.

So at the end of every blog post I will list the subject terms (tags)

…but I don’t want these to point to Technorati, I want them to point to a tag/s in my del.icio.us account.

The problem is that this is a manual process, compared to pointing to Technorati, as I have to bookmark the post at my del.icio.us account straight after publishing the post

…the good thing is that when I enter the URL/s for my subject terms at the end of my blog post, even if it is a new tag to my del.icio.us account, I can make up the URL even though that tag hasn’t any bookmarks yet.
ie. the URL still exists devoid of containing any bookmarks.
(So once I’ve published my post, I don’t have to go back to edit anything).

Now if I’m doing this (posting) several times a day I need an automated tool, like those developed for Technorati tags; a bookmarklet, where I can fill in the tag name/s in a few boxes and it will automatically write the HTML at the end of my blog post (with the tags pointing to my del.icio.us account).

Next, is just pure automation, Bud Gibson also mentions in his post:

“…it would seem possible to write a plug-in solution for weblogging software that would automatically post weblog entries to social bookmarking repositories that shared this api.”

In this case, I would be achieving what I want to do, with hardly any extra effort at all.

So my subject terms would be in my del.icio.us account (the del.icio.us account has the same name as the blog) under a bundle called “Subject Terms”, this bundle is represented as a tag cloud (a subject term list with added meaning).
I could also include tags, that are the same as my blog category names, and put these under a bundle heading called “Categories”…this way you can also view a tag cloud of my blog categories.

In the end, my del.icio.us account is a title index of my blog, browsable by date or tag (from a choice of category tags or subject terms tags).

This can be a link on the sidebar of a blog…or even incorporate the tag cloud in your blog sidebar, or in a post…see here.

I don’t envy myself going back and re-indexing all my blog content…maybe I’ll sit on this one for the moment.