Tagging: What is it Good For - Part 2

Second in a series of three posts for communications pros that will hopefully explain tagging, using tags in practical applications for marketing communications and their implications in moving to “modern media” communications.

In part one, I described tagging as assigning single words to describe or categorize any web content.  And while somewhat similar to bookmarking a web page on your computer, it is far more powerful.  It is not a systematic or hierarchical categorizing method (like folders) – it is simply using one or more words that make sense to you to categorize content.  And, instead of the entry (URL) being saved on your own machine, it is saved on “social bookmarking” sites or shared photo sites – publicly available sites that anyone can use to tag web content.  That also means anyone can search for content by tags assigned by everyone else – so resources become shared by way of this communal tagging.

Two key sites in which social bookmark tagging comes to life are del.icio.us and Technorati.  Understanding the basics of these two sites means you can start leveraging the new generation of tools for content organization, distribution and search.

Del.icio.us is the site that popularized social bookmarking.  Its looks are barebones, but its straightforward functionality epitomizes the basics of all social bookmarking sites.  Del.icio.us is actually a “bookmark manager.”  It allows you to add sites to your personal collection of links, to assign tags to each one to categorize them in your own personal way, and then to share all those links with others – through tags.

Del.icio.us gives you multiple “views” of tagged bookmarks. Every user has a unique “home page” (del.icio.us/username). This page includes all your own bookmarks, along with a sidebar showing all your tags.  Each of your tags has a “home page” (del.icio.us/username/tag) with links to sites you’ve assigned that tag to, also with a list of related tags.  And, every tag itself has a shared home page, (del.icio.us/tag/communications), on which you will see everyone’s bookmarks (including yours) that have that tag assigned to it, along with a list of related tags linked to each of those individual tag pages.

Certainly being able to access your bookmarks from anywhere is a big advantage.  Being able to tap into resources other people find useful expands everyone’s horizons.  But add RSS to the mix and now you’ve got powerful amplification.  Here’s why:

First, you can subscribe to any tag or any user’s public tags using Really Simple Syndication.  That means when anyone adds a bookmark in del.icio.us with that tag, you are notified via your RSS newsreader.  If you want to follow what a particular del.icio.us user is adding to their tags, you can use RSS to subscribe to their del.icio.us home page or individual tag page.  So, what you can do, so other’s can do with your bookmarks, pages and tags. 

Plus, the new generation of search engines, like Technorati use RSS, tags and sites like del.icio.us to return relevant results to searches.

Technorati follows some 15 million blogs via RSS feeds, but it also incorporates links from tags on del.icio.us and Furl, as well as images tagged on the photo-sharing sites Flickr and Buzznet.  Technorati keyword searches return individual blog entries that contain the desired keyword(s) – but if that keyword happens to be a del.icio.us or Furl tag, Technorati also returns a display of links associated with that tag/keyword along with links to any related tag words. 

Technorati and similar search sites rely on RSS to “find” content. It returns content from what Technorati calls the “world live web” -  often indexing newly updated content within ten minutes.  While blogs are in large part what Technorati indexes because RSS is a part of most blogs, by incorporating RSS into even “regular” web pages, you can turn any web page into a “live” page by tagging it on del.icio.us and encouraging Technorati to index it every time the page is updated.  More on this later.

And, like del.icio.us, Technorati offers RSS subscription to keywords, but also to URLs.  By creating a Technorati “watchlist” and subscribing to it, you will receive updated links every hour via your RSS newsreader, keeping you up-to-date on new blog entries, tag entries and links to a specific URL.

While there are many ways to incorporate these two types of tools into your communications, an obvious application is to start tagging your content pages and blog entries, subscribing to tags related to your areas of interest, and, of course, subscribing to your own blog or website URL through del.icio.us and Technorati to track whose referencing you.

Next, putting it all together with practical uses for tagging in your communications.

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