Library clips

A few posts ago I mentioned that Technorati has a tag cloud for your profile, clicking on a tag from here will list your posts within that tag…so the next step is to put a tag cloud on your blog.

This way people can browse your blog by tag…even though it takes them to a page outside your blog, who cares, it is good enough for now…only if Technorati would provide this code…anybody listening.

NOTE:If you bookmark your blog posts in del.icio.us and put the tagroll on your sidebar this is a similar idea, but now you can nearly do this with Technorati, so you need not bother bookmark your blog posts in del.icio.us for this reason (I guess bookmarking in del.icio.us gives your blog posts more exposure, but some consider this spamming, anyway there are ways to automatically bookmark your posts at time of posting - no effort at all).

Also a clever idea I found at Freshblog was the way you could choose a del.icio.us tag from a hacked drop down list on your sidebar and it would list posts within that tag at your blog instead of launching to del.icio.us, very clever (but I’d like to do this from the tagroll without using the hack drop down)…here’s another implementation.
I can’t see why this can’t be done if we are going to use the Technorati tag cloud in the future…the good thing about launching to the Technorati site is that you can further view items within a tag by all blogs.

Or what about just making internal tags (but how would you make a tag cloud from internal tags…see more.)

If you don’t use tags, Technorati still picks up your blog categories as tags, so you can have a tag cloud version of your categories…now you have two ways to browse categories, one within your blog, and one outside your blog (but the good thing about a tag cloud, as opposed to a list, is it gives context to your categories).

Anyway I failed to mention in the other post that at the end of every blog post we can now point to our user space at Technorati Tags…before hand at the end of a post we listed some tags that point to Technorati Tags or wherever you like, this is good to discover other like content, but you can’t see other like content just from your site…well now you can as our user name can be included in the URL.

Here’s the old way:
folksonomy

This is the code:
a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/folksonomy” rel=”tag”>folksonomy

NOTE: I haven’t included the opening and closing tags, as then my raw code disappears, is there an easier way to treat the HTML as normal text so I can publish the code.

Here’s the new way:
folksonomy

This is the code:
a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/folksonomy?user=johnt” rel=”tag”>folksonomy

Actually I don’t know if this new way works, but it would be good if it did…of course you could list both ways, but you really only need to list the new way, as when it launches to your user tag page on Technorati, you are one click away from “Search all blogs”.

Passing categories

Before I mentioned a post that hacked a category box into your blog that re-directed your del.icio.us tags to be viewed within your blog (this is crucial for Blogger users so people can browse their posts by category, as this is not a feature of Blogger).

If you read on there is also mention of passing categories between blogs, this is just amazing.
What happens is if you are viewing all posts on one blog within a category, you can then go to the blogroll of that blog and launch to another blog, and it won’t just go to the home page, it will go to the same category page as the blog that you were just on…great for discovery

…of course all blogs on the blogroll have to have the same category hack installed, and use the same categories, unless there is a way for the code to decide on the closest or most similar category via a synonym ring of some sort.

What an idea…so now you can not only view like posts from tags in the blogosphere (Technorati Tags), but you can also view like posts from tags in your blogroll or network.

Now this got me thinking, at the end of every blog post I could list my Technorati Tags, but also list my blogroll or network tags.

Here’s what the end of my blog post would look like (for Technorati I’m point to the general tag level, and not the user tag level for this example):

Technorati Tags: tagging, blogs, technorati

Network Tags: tagging, blogs, technorati

For the network tags I wouldn’t use the rel=”tag” part as they are being picked up by the Corante Web Hub anyway.

On my sidebar I could have my user tag cloud from Technorati, and my network tag cloud from the Corante Web Hub

…but it wouldn’t be like the tag cloud on the home page of the Corante Web Hub, it would only include the tags I use on my blog, the idea is that when you click on one you can see my posts within that tag, and other posts from the network that use that tag…so what Technorati does for the blogosphere, I would be doing at the network level.
I could also maybe use Technorati to do this…imagine if you could view Technorati Tags just according to the Corante Web Hub OPML file…then I could also use this tag cloud as well on my sidebar.

In this case at the end of my blog post I would list the Technorati Tags pointing to my user level tag, then the Technorati page could say “Search your OPML”, “Search all blogs”

…you could maybe change the “Search your OPML”, to “Search Corante Web Hub blogs”…and it would be good if you weren’t just limited to one, but be able to load as many OPML’s as you like.