Library clips

A follow up from my last post on blog tagging.

At the footer of blog posts people sometimes apply tags, these most often point to Technorati Tags, del.icio.us, wikipedia…they can point anywhere you want them to (Technorati will still pick it up regardless).

If our blog post tags point to del.icio.us or Technorati, then people can discover similar posts from the web (as these posts also have this tag).

But what if you want to point to similar posts from just your blog (not the whole blogosphere)…as mentioned in the previous post not all bloggers have access to a local tag system in their blog, so they use a 3rd party service instead.

One way is to point to your del.icio.us user space:
eg. <a href="http://del.icio.us/johnt/tag/blogs" rel="tag">blogs</a>

Or you could point to your Technorati user space:
eg. <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/folksonomy?user=johnt" rel="tag">blogs</a>

Freshblog has made a bookmarklet that points to your Technorati user space you just have to edit it with your user name…this bookmarklet didn’t agree with the code on my blog platform, but for blogger users it’s supremo.

Edit your own bookmarklet

A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and wordpress.com Users illustrates just how to edit your own bookmarklet to suit your needs.

Find the bookmarklet for general Technorati Tags, at the end of this blog post, Oddiophile’s Technorati Tags Bookmarklet is available here.

I have edited the Oddi bookmarklet with my own del.icio.us user name, Technorati%20Tags:%20′;for(var%20i=0;i
%200){a+=’,%20′;}a+=’‘+tr[i]+’‘;}a+='’;prompt(’Copy%20this%20code,%20press%20OK,%20then%20paste%20to%20your%20blog%20entry:’,a);})()”>bookmarklet which will point to my Technorati user name:

javascript:(function(){var%20a='’;var%20t=prompt(’Enter%20Tags:’,'’);var%20tr=t.split(’%20′);a+=’<span%20class=’+unescape(’%22′)+’technoratitag’+unescape(’%22′)+’>Technorati%20Tags:%20′;for(var%20i=0;i<tr%20.length;i++){if(i%20>%200){a+=’,%20′;}a+=’<a%20href=’+unescape(’%22′)+’http://www.technorati.com/tags/’+tr[i]+’?user=johnt‘+unescape(’%22′)+’%20rel=’+unescape(’%22′)+’tag’+unescape(’%22′)+’>’+tr[i]+’</a>’;}a+='’;prompt(’Copy%20this%20code,%20press%20OK,%20then%20paste%20to%20your%20blog%20entry:’,a);})()

In this example all I changed was:

http://www.technorati.com/tags/’+tr[i]+ to http://www.technorati.com/tags/’+tr[i]+’?user=johnt

Do it yourself

Firstly add my version of the bookmarklet to your Browser (right-click, then add to favourites),
then find it in favourites, and right-click and choose properties, just replace my user name with yours, and click apply…done.

Issue

What if you want each tag to point to multiple spaces,

eg.

Local space
(user space at del.icio.us or Technorati…eg. http://del.icio.us/johnt/blog or http://www.technorati.com/tags/blog?user=johnt)
Bookmarks tags
(del.icio.us community level…eg. http://del.icio.us/tag/blog)
Blogosphere tags
(Technorati…eg. http://www.technnorati/tags/blog)
Network
(Corante Web Hub…eg. the tag cloud seems to be disabled)
Blog search
(either Technorati or Google Blog Search…eg. http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=blog or http://www.technorati.com/search/Bush)
Information
(wikipedia…eg.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)

That’s all I can think of for now…you can see for each tag on my blog post, I want to point to all these places for discovery.

But it will take up a lot of blog post real estate eg. imagine you assigned 8 tags for a blog post, and each tag had to point to these 5 places…and also one mega bookmarklet would need to generate tags for all these services.

Solution

This could be an option:

Tags: blog rss folksonomy

Clicking on the tag name could take you to a internal tag space or a del.icio.us user name space (whatever you like), then click on the icons to discover similar posts from the blogosphere…but this again takes up too much space, we need someway to hide this stuff…although I’d like to see a bookmarklet that does this.

So another option is to hide it in a box, when you click on each tag a box is revealed, with links to each service…this is a start.

A tag landing page in another option.

Grazr macro is something I’d like to see.

Supertags - I remember seeing this on someones blog, I remember it saving space and allowing you to point to lots of places for each tag…where are you?

Problem (not really)

If you tag a post web+2.0, del.icio.us would have no problem, either would Technorati Tags, but how would Technorati search, Google Blog search or wikipedia treat this?

Google Blog search seems to do an AND search: web+2.0, or more simply: web 2.0 (both have the same number of hits…a space is an implied AND)

Technorati search also will imply an AND search: web+2.0, or use the advanced search, contain all these words: web 2.0 (this is the same as typing web AND 2.0 in the main search box)…both these searches return the same results.

Look what we get with Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/web+2.0…the “+” is just treated like a letter character.

More
TagOverlay: Reverse Bookmarking

For more bookmarklets, see
More Must-Have Bookmarklets Than You Can Swing a Browser At