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The excessively sharp-eyed of you may have noticed that I have recently switch from listing tags at the end of posts to using WordPress tags at the end of posts. Here’s why. Not that you should care.

When tagging first took off, there weren’t a lot of good places to link your tags to. So, I chose to have them link to Technorati because Technorati was then the leading search engine for blogs. Plus, Technorati had taken the lead in making itself tag-worthy. Plus, Technorati was founded by a friend of mine — David Sifry — who I trusted (and still do trust) to do the Right Thing. Also, I was on the Technorati board of advisers (uncompensated), so I had some basic familiarity with the site and the the people. As a result, when you click on one of my old-style tags, it does a search for tags at Technorati and shows you the results. For example, here’s a tag to try: [Tags: ].

A couple of years ago, Word Press — the blogging software I use — introduced its own tagging capability. Instead of my having to hand-create links to the tags I want to use (actually, I wrote a little javascript to do it for me), I can enter tags and Word Press will turn them into links that aggregate all of my own postings that I’ve tagged that way. At the bottom of this post, you can try out the taxonomy link.

This is a further step into narcissism, for rather than seeing what the rest of the world has tagged “e-gov” (or whatever), you now see only my posts tagged that way. But I suspect that is probably what most users expect and want when they click on a tag at the bottom of a post. If you want to search all posts by everyone that have a certain tag, Technorati and other sites will do it for you.

(By the way, many thanks to Brad Sucks for writing the scripts that extracted my old tags and auto-inserted them as Word Press tags. He says the scripts are too focused to be of general use, so don’t ask. But do buy his music.)

4 Responses to “From Technorati to WordPress tag namespace”

  1. on 06 Oct 2009 at 9:44 amStephen Francoeur

    The Tagaroo plugin for Word Press supplements well your own tagging efforts in Word Press. Using the Open Calais service from Thomson Reuters, it autosuggests tags as you compose the post. You don’t have to use them but it is nice to get the suggestions all the same. We’ve been using that plugin on the Newman Library Idea Lab blog since we launched it over the summer. I have noticed, though, that the plugin can slow your browser down as it repeatedly connects to the Open Calais service as you type.

  2. on 06 Oct 2009 at 5:40 pmScot Colford

    Hmm. I’m missing something. Did you mess up your WP tag table? I see nothing.

  3. on 13 Dec 2010 at 3:45 pmbest interest rates

    it’s hard effective interest rates on savings currently. the banks are generally not presenting great interest rates

  4. on 14 Jan 2011 at 11:19 amHiMY SYeD

    David,

    Your book proved to be a profound milestone in my understanding of how and where to categorize my content online.

    Curious where your ‘tags’ are for your blog entries here, on the site?

    Wasn’t a key insight of your book that all blog posts should be tagged?

    Thanks

    HiMY SYeD