Library clips

If you are reading a blog post, usually there is a label to say which category/s have been assigned to that blog post…if you click this category link, (or click from the category list on the sidebar) to see similar posts you can view them within the blog itself (this is nothing different).

If your blog doesn’t support categories, or you want to supplement keywords/subject terms as well for your blog posts you can apply Technorati Tags at the end of each post…then Technorati will aggregate your post with other blogosphere posts of the same tag.
Technorati Tags will also treat your blog categories as tags by default and aggregate these into their service.

Now if you are reading a blog post, and want to read other posts from the same category in the blog you click the category you desire as mentioned before, or you could use the Technorati Tags which can be even more specific, like keywords…so you click on one of the Technorati Tags but this time it launches to the Technorati website. This is great your website has both categories and tags, but does it.

First problem, you’d rather read more posts with the same tag from the same blog, within the blog itself like you do with categories.

Second problem, how are you meant to isolate the posts from the same blog within a tag at Technorati
…it would be good if you could do a site search combined with a tag search, like,

Site:libraryclips.blogsome.com Tag:furl
(you can do this sort of thing at Blogdigger - ie. search just within a category of a blog)

So in essence it would be better instead of pointing to the general tag, if you could point to the same tag within your user space at Technorati (but Technorati doesn’t offer a user space)…this would be similar to using del.icio.us.

Doing this helps clarify problem 2, but not problem 1.

If you were to do this you would make a del.icio.us account as a mirror for your blog content, then at the end of each blog post apply tags that point to your del.icio.us account instead of Technorati Tags…remember not to point them to the general tag level at del.icio.us, instead within your user name tag level, otherwise this would be too general like Technorati Tags and you’d have to browse for your posts amongst the noise of other blog posts with the same tag.

Another problem with this is that you have to remember to manually bookmark a post in your del.icio.us account straight after you publish the blog post…there is a plug-in to automatically post your blog categories at your del.icio.us space as you publish your post, I’m not sure if it would also automatically post the manual tag/s you add to your post that points to your del.icio.us account.

Now even though you are pointing to del.icio.us and not Technorati Tags, it doesn’t matter, Technorati Tags will still aggregate the tag…read their instructions, it says it doesn’t matter the URL you point to, as long as you use the “rel=” syntax, they will aggregate.

So by using del.icio.us, you are not missing out on your blog content being aggregated by Technorati Tags so people can discover your stuff, and the benefit is that you can view your blog content by tag…only problem as already stated, is that you can’t view content by tag within your blog as you do with the built-in blog categories, you have to view it at del.icio.us.

The other problem is that you can’t export your del.icio.us tag cloud in order to put it in the sidebar of your blog, instead you would have to manually put a list of links of each tag, or just put a link pointing to your user account at del.icio.us, like “see tags for this blog here” (this is a good system if your blog doesn’t support categories…also another way).

So the plan is to then make built-in tags for your blog, so you can view your blog content by tag, as well as by category all within the blog, and hopefully Technorati Tags will pick up your tags as it does your categories.
To do this you need a plug-in for your blog, check out Moveable Type, and 2 versions for Wordpress…see more.

Done…you can now have both categories and tags (subject keywords) in your blog…what’s important is that you can view your blog content by tag within your blog, just as you do categories, and also, Technorati Tags will pick up both the categories and Tags in your blog even though you are not pointing to them…and you don’t have to duplicate your content in del.icio.us.

What if…

Another perspective is instead of manually pointing to Technorati Tags via tags at the end of your blog post, these could point to an installed social bookmark manager (scuttle or del.irio.us), this could become a topic portal. You’d only put these tags in blog posts that are relevant to your topic portal, and also tell others if they post about a particular topic to point their manual tags “rel=” to your portal instead of or as well as Technorati Tags.

As Bud Gibson points out:

“By encouraging people to point at their repositories when tagging, site owners will get search engine credit and become known as sources for the topics covered by those tags. Others are most likely to point at site-owners when site owners are already producing and aggregating high quality content…”

Bud’s xFolk format is all about this:

“…site owners should publish their tagged blog entries and bookmark repository with a folksonomy-oriented microformat like xFolk. The tags should point at the site-owner’s tag repository, not some third party’s. xFolk is optimized for publishing and sharing bookmarks in repositories, and because it incorporates reltag, it also works for blog entries. Using a microformat will eventually also allow your repository and blog links to be easily picked up by tag search engines that are starting to emerge.”

How do you and others ping your repository; Bud suggests the possibility of an automated procedure of your repository being bookmarked at the same time as you publish your blog post, we already touched on this sort of thing above

…I’m not sure on this, how to you ping content into a social bookmark manager, don’t you have to physically bookmark content into the service.

So in this respect you can build a vertical search engine so to speak, without having to crawl and index the web, as your repository is populated by people pinging it, and at the same time it will get picked up by Technorati Tags anyway…once you have set this up, there is no extra effort than usual, and you get much greater rewards.

eg. see Podcast Tags

Why Technorati anyway?

As mentioned before you can point to any URL, and Technorati will pick it up, here are some related posts:

Do Tags Work?
Tagging is for posts
Links and votes
OpenTopics
What Do Tags Mean?

Related post:
Blog post: del.icio.us tags