Imagine my amusement today when, in the midst of my trusty administrator’s work adding tags and tag cloud(s) to my blog, I found this item at BBC News:
Tagging ‘takes off for web users’
Tagging or labelling online content is becoming the new search tool of choice among web users, shows research.
As more and more people put their own content online, they are also being invited to tag it with descriptive keywords to help organise their data. (read article)
Please excuse any blog viewing hiccups that may occur during this ongoing process.
1.
I think that articles about “tagging” have been around for some time. Perhaps because I’d been spending the last week or two tagging some of your past posts, you were more aware of the term, and just now ‘noticed’ it in the news?
Tagging is just a variation of indexing. Have you happened across some fantastic blog entry, found yourself curious as to what else on the same topic that author had written, and been confronted solely with “archives” as a method of navigating the author’s posting history?
It also seems that with category or tag navigation, marking “visited” links a different color would be an important reader aid. Maybe you or I will get around to that someday. Currently, links in the story content section (division) change color to a somewhat lighter shade if they’re visited, but in most, maybe all, other divisions they do not.
Comment by Ken — February 5, 2007 @ 12:41 pm
2.
Synchronicity rules!
Comment by Sarah — February 6, 2007 @ 11:59 am
3.
I keep reading about synchronicities in fellow bloggers lives and now you…
Comment by violetismycolor — February 6, 2007 @ 9:10 pm
4.
Backtagging must be a real bother! I thought about it after I realized I could use Technorati to create tags for the posts in my Blogger.com blog, but the amount of work involved, and the fact that each post would then automatically reissue through my RSS feeds, stopped me from doing it. I could just imagine subscribers looking at the feed and saying “What’s this? A post that’s two years old? The old girl’s off her nut!”
What’s the upside? Will the search engines and social bookmarking sites reindex the website and take note of the tags?
Comment by Georganna Hancock — February 7, 2007 @ 10:42 am
5.
Georganna, Perhaps Barbara will answer you, but I also had a couple of thoughts. I have no idea how blogger.com blogs operate, so making presumptions about another platform to differentiate their operational logistics would seem shortsighted of me. WordPress is familiar, so the following is presented from that point-of-view.
The administrator can control whether pings are sent out. Editing and saving a post on Wordpress doesn’t change its first published date, and if a ping hasn’t been directed to be sent out, then there should be no update notification to various third-party indexing services.
One old post was pinged internally in this process, you can see it today in “recent comments” in the right column of the root page, because automatic pingbacks were kept off in the past when they didn’t operate well on this server, back then. Undoubtedly, that is also a recent RSS “comment” entry. That was a mistake.
The primary concern of this project is so that human readers can easier find older content that might interest them, rather than just seeing the first few blog entries at the top. The secondary concern is so that Barbara herself can find her old content using better tools than are found in, say, books or a paper journal, or in the Admin panel, and indexing may give her further insight into her own writing.
Comment by Ken — February 7, 2007 @ 1:23 pm
6.
Georganna, it is a lot of work, for which I’m really grateful. The interesting thing about having someone else do the categorizing and tagging of my posts here is that it gives me a strange sort of map of my mind (scary thought, a map of Barbara’s brain) from another person’s perspective. I didn’t realize, for instance, that I tend to bring in so many varied topics in one essay that I consider to be about one particular subject. It’s a surprising glance at how my mind works, and odd to see my thought processes reflected back this way — but in a good way. I think.
As to the age of the posts, I think most of my more essay-like posts are as relevant now as they were when I wrote them — unless they specifically referenced current events. There are blogs out there that are more like the writers’ way of keeping friends and family informed, a kind of public correspondence, which might be more time sensitive than some of what I write here, so I can see why not everyone would want to do this — or why they might not for that matter even want to keep an archive of old posts. Back tagging (I like that name you gave it, btw) is not for everyone, and I wouldn’t have time to do it myself right now, so it wouldn’t even be practical for me if I didn’t have someone who was interested and kind enough to put in the work.
Comment by Barbara — February 7, 2007 @ 3:58 pm
7.
At the very end of the process, I will be done with it, and Barbara will likely decide to rearrange my classifications and tags. She has the final say on all of it.
In the end, in answer to Georganna’s question regarding “what’s the upside?”, I reply, “It’s just an experiment”, as Barbara’s webpages have always been since they were first created.
Comment by Ken — February 9, 2007 @ 2:10 pm