The Googleplex Blog

Isn't It del.icio.us?

In my continuing survey of tags, tagging, and folksonomies, I now turn to del.icio.us. (Previous posts on the Googleplex Blog and O'Reilly covered Technorati, universal tagging, Folksonomic Discovery, and Gataga.)

First, the domain name del.icio.us is clever beyond belief. In fact, it is delicious. Whether or not tagging is important, these people should be given credit for cool word play.

To use del.icio.us, you need to register for the service. Once logged in, you can add "bookmarklets" to your browser. In Internet Explorer, the bookmarklets sit on the browser's Links menu.

Adding these bookmarklets to your browser lets you tag web pages - meaning, you can add one word descriptors. You can view your own tags for pages, and those of others, usin another bookmarklet in your browser. Tags can also be discovered in quite a few other ways: by URL for tag, or author (and more) and sliced and diced via RSS. For example, each web page that has been tagged in del.icio.us has an RSS feed (the tags are the items in the feed).

There's also a nice API in del.icio.us, and quite a few programming hacks already out there that use this folksonomy.

Finally, each user has a home page which is an easy way to access del.icio.us tags, users, and categories they've bookmarked.

So why should one bother with this? First, there's an appeal to self-interest. It makes sense to appropriately tag one's own pages in del.icio.us. Good tagging should lead to more traffic in much the same way that developing good meta information helps webmasters with the search engines. Second, it is fun to categorize our worlds. Since del.icio.us tags are used as part of the core library of other web folksonomies (for example, Technorati), efforts tagging via del.icio.us contribute to the common welfare. Finally, browsing popular tags is a good discovery mechanism - both ad hoc serendipity, and also following people who are interested in a research question similar to something you may be looking into.

Once again, if I am missing something, please let me know!

What Is It about Technorati and Tagging?

I'm going to be survey the world of tagging on the web, because I think this is an important (and occasionally obscure) area. Tagging has been dubbed the process of creating a folksonomy because it creates categorization schemes from the ground-up, rather than imposing heirarchies based on the opinion's of experts.

Let's start with Technorati. Technorati bills itself as the leading authority with what is going on in weblogs.

A little less nebulously, Technorati offers three important facilities:
- You can claim a weblog
- You can mark a post with a tag
- You can contribute your own tags

For these services to be meaningful, Technorati needs a library of tags and associations. This compendium comes from photos tagged in Flickr, links tagged in Delicious and Furl, and tags suggested by bloggers.

To claim a blog, you create a Technorati account, enter the URL for your blog, click the Claim Weblog button, add a little JavaScript code to the front page (or sidebar) of your blog, and ping Technorati to tell them you've added the code. (Here are instructions and discussion in the Technorati blog.) The code on your blog front page adds a link to all the blogs that link to yours. For example, I followed this process for Photoblog 2.0; you can see the Technorati logo and link part way down the sidebar on the right.

To add a blog entry of yours to the Technorati discussion "about" a given tag, search in Technorati for the tag, and then add the generated HTML code for the tag to your blog entry. For example, I am adding the Technorati link code for the tags Technorati, Tags, tagging, and folksonomy to this entry. In my opinion, this process and facility is the most important Technorati offering - it's a great way to direct traffic interested in an area of discussion to your blog. This makes for high-quality traffic, because the content is relevant, and it makes it in the interest of bloggers to extent the Technorati folksonomy.

To add tags to the Technorati collection, you can add a tag to one of the sources Technorati uses, such as Flickr. Alternatively, you can tag your tag in one of two ways within your blog page (more information). Creating a category within a blog tells Technorati to treat the name of the category as a tag.