Tagging And Metadata and Why Bother

January 21, 2008 · Comments

bumperstickers Steven Hodson wrote a post that got me thinking. He was asking whether bloggers used tagging in their posts to extend the conversation by encouraging people in via search. I looked at my Google Analytics, and it turned out that traffic coming to my site via Technorati style tags was the 21st potential way someone was coming to my site.

Thus my question: why bother tagging? Here are my thoughts on the answer:

Tags are a way of adding a layer of metadata onto something one has placed on the web. We tag photos in Flickr, for organizing, for giving labels to images, to help computers see them. We tag blog posts, songs, profile information, and all kinds of other things. Why?

In his book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger talks about the need for tagging growing out of an ever more complex collection of bookmarks. It became a different way to organize information. And it is. When I search through my social bookmarks, I often don’t remember the names of the sites I’m searching for. Instead, I remember the topic I came up with to remind me where to look.

This kind of folksonomy becomes useful, because it means that even if YOU call something a great “Thought Leader Program,” I might call it “weblearning,” and leave it at that. Meaning, we don’t have to agree on how to file something in a world with tags. You say to-MAY-to, and I say to-MAH-to. (Add two strips of bacn and some lettuce, and we’re a sandwich!)

Why YOU Should Tag

Helping people understand your content is important. If at all possible, spend time tagging the content you make so that others might find it in a search. Think about how THEY will look for it, and label your tags accordingly. Don’t worry so much abou how your people actually want the data. They can use del.icio.us and other tools to re-tag it their own way. But help out in a starter set.

I’m going to tag my stuff because I want to make sure I can find it again. My categories were decided long ago on my blog site, and they’re not especially helpful. My tags? Not bad.

What about you? What are you doing with tagging? How have you built your tags in the past? What are your thoughts on how they reflect on your media?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

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  • I definitely agree that tags are helpful as more and more content pours out into the world. I have two tagging strategies: the labeling strategy that I use on Blogger, and the hashtagging strategy that I use on Twitter.

    When I started my current blog in February 2007, I knew that labeling of posts would be essential. This blog was in essence a combination of several previous blogs, including a technology blog and a religious blog, and I knew that I would have some readers who were interested in one topic but very uninterested in the other topics. Therefore I set up Blogger labels (business, politics, etc.) and promoted the most popular ones so that people could choose their desired content. However, it doesn't appear that many people availed themselves of the labeled segments. (By the way, what I didn't anticipate is that many of my blog posts would cross multiple categories.)

    I use a different, much more informal strategy when hashtagging my Twitter tweets. In my view, Twitter is best suited to cover emergencies and scheduled events. If I think of it, I'll apply a hashtag such as #caprimary to my tweets as appropriate. I've also tried some of the metahashtags proposed by Stowe Boyd and others, but as of now they haven't really caught on beyond a select few.
  • I'm trying to make sense of tagging and its importance in a world of in-depth search, and this starts to explain its importance.
  • Sam
    I think that sometime in the next 12 months we'll see a new search engine that makes better use of tagged material. I highly agree it's a worthwhile undertaking

    http://www.leveragingideas.com
  • I tend to use tags for myself more than for the benefit of my readers. I like checking my tag cloud and seeing how I'm concentrating my topics as well.
  • I tag my posts and videos mostly so that people can find them in searches. But I just recently started categorizing my posts by tags instead of categories. I haven't gone back yet and tag all my older posts but I plan to some day.
  • Thanks for the reminder. This was on my to-do list after installing a new seo plugin on my wordpress blog. It is so easy and so valuable that everyone should do it.

    What do you think of tag clouds as navigation? I know some people don't find them useful.
  • I think tag CLOUDS kind of bug me. I don't think most people navigate via them. They're neat as quick data sets, but not especially neat to navigate by. Our minds don't work that way, and besides, those clouds almost always only size based on frequency. There aren't other options like relevance.

    Now that would be sexy. Semantic tag clouds.
  • We definitely tag our posts, both blogs and articles. We use Headspace 2 in the Wordpress Plugins. Makes it very easy to add tags, and a page description. Plus, it will suggest tags to add once you have hit "save & continue".

    http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/
  • By the way, this guy is doing some serious thinking about tag clouds.
  • One of the ways I use tagging extensively is on del.icio.us. This enables an RSS feed for each tag. For many of the tags I use, these feeds are used to populate and automatically update link content on specific sites, in particular my Squidoo lenses and i-digg.com site.
  • I love the idea of tagging, and am trying to use it more effectively across my life... One strategy I am using is to have a Netvibes section dedicated to the main tags that I use - This reminds me BOTH to tag things, and what common tags I use...

    I can now do a quick search across all my preferred sites for a single tag, and it will return Flickr pictures, del.icio.us links, and my blog posts.
  • Amanda Gravel talks about del.icio.us and why she tags EVERYTHING so that people can find her and figure out who she is and what interests her.

    Awesome idea.

    http://socialhoneycomb.com/delicious-portfolio
  • I'm creating a new site, and I'm seriously wondering if it's worth it at all to tag my posts.

    On my last site, I did... had a big ol' tag cloud and everything... but testing showed me that it almost never got clicked.

    Like Douglas Karr and Scramblejam said, I like seeing what I've done, but is it of use to users? Doubting it, seriously.
  • Chris,

    This is an issue I've been struggling with for a while and your post has started to make some sense out of it for me.

    However, just when I thought the clouds were parting, one of your very simple comments confuses things for me.

    When you make the example of two different people tagging content two different ways, it seemed like you were suggesting that it was the tags that would help each of them find the other's content.

    What I'm still struggling to understand is HOW? Isn't this exactly the issue we have with categories? If I tag something as "elearning" how is the person who considers it "distance learning" ever going to find my stuff? Won't he continue to search on the tags he is comfortable with?

    Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
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