Changes, Part II, continued...

Saturday, 12 March 2005

Changes, Part II, continued...

From 'Categories' to 'Tags':

Those of you who use categories to organize your posts are probably wondering what happened and, most of all, why. The rest of you are saying, 'huh'?

Tags, as used here, may be thought of as keywords that you apply to your posts, quite similar to categories in that they are both ways to organize posts by subject matter. I'll first explain the theory, than the "how to". Skip down to "Here's how to get started" if you're impatient!

The simplest explanation of the difference between the two is that tags have powerful search and socializing features that categories don't. Yet, at the same time, they allow a similar navigation function on individual blogs.

There are, however, two limitations with respect to categories. There are technical reasons for these restrictions and we are researching ways around them. For the forseeable future, however, that's the way it is. Tags cannot contain accented characters, special characters such as asterisks or dashes or non-latin characters -- only alphanumeric characters from the latin alphabet. The other drawback is that you cannot easily have a link "description" for the category links on your blog. In other words, when the mouse pointer hovers over the link, you cannot display a customized text title. (There may be a way to do this by hand coding in your template, however.)

On the other hand, the positive elements that convinced us to implement this system are pretty cool and should become more obvious and useful with time.

Principally, there are two enormous advantages. Your tagged posts have a greater chance to be found and read by other people interested in the subject of your tag, and you, as a reader, will be able to more easily find new and interesting blogs to read, organized by subject. Blogs, by their very nature, are often not about only one subject, they are quite hard to categorize by traditional means. Individual posts, however, can often be characterized by one or more commonly used keyword and tags allow you to apply multiple keywords to your individual posts.

Once you start applying tags to your post (it’s VERY easy to do, read on), other people will be able to navigate through the most recent posts on mo’time by tag. And not just by a single keyword, but with several. You click on one word, "photos" for instance, and then you will see a list of all the recent posts that contain that word, PLUS a list of other related keywords, posts that have been tagged not only with "photos" but with other descriptors, "landscape", for instance. Clicking on "landscape", you will then see a list of all posts that have been tagged with both words, PLUS a list of other posts (assuming they exist) that have been tagged with a third term. Go to recent posts and click around to see how it works.

At the start you will notice that most single tags will catalog the posts of a single person. This is because the relatively few people who have been using the categories function have "seeded" the database with their naming conventions. As you guys use the system, that will change and the tags will be distributed across many different blogs.

Exploring the combinations of tags, you will make some great discoveries of new blogs through surprising combinations of subject areas and will learn how to apply combinations of tags to your posts.

You will find things that you didn't know you were looking for.

Once you get the feel for this, you can start tagging your posts according to your own whims. You will see, however, that the closer you follow the more common tag names created by our community, the more chance you will have of being found by interested readers.

OK, enough theory.

Here’s how to get started. If you’ve already got categories, you’ll have noticed that they have been automatically converted into tags. Spaces may have been changed to" _" for now, but we are still in the de-bugging phase. The underscores will eventually disappear. Special characters will have been changed to unaccented alpha-numeric characters in the latin alphabet. To correct or edit your old category names, simply click the "Edit" link in your post editor, on the right side next to the Tags field.

If you’re just getting started, there’s nothing to it. You will see the Tags field on the right side of your editor. Before you click the Publish button, just write in the tags that you want to apply to the post separated by a space. That's it. Afterwards, they become are automatically added in to a list in your editor. To change a Tag, click the Edit link next to the Tags field.

Guidelines:
- All tags must be at least 4 characters in length.
- Tags ideally should be single words. If you must use more words (as in "rock and roll"), put them in "quotes".
- Use common descriptors (see these examples) rather than funny, ironic or obscure words, if you’d like the tag to be most useful in the community context. If, on the other hand, you want to use them just to navigate the categories on your own blog, be as personal as you like.

Background and further reading:

The concept of tags as a social system is fairly new, but there is already quite a lot published on the subject, considering its recent pedigree. It is sometimes referred to as "folksonomies"... Want to read more about this stuff?

Wikipedia on Folksonomy
Taxonomies_and_tags
Folksonomies
http://del.icio.us/
Technorati tags

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome. More importantly, I want you to get out there and start using tags!

posted by: howard at 15:13 | link | comments (9) |
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Comments:

#1 12 March 2005 - 17:43

Hi Howard,

My blog is about planning lifelong learning, and I would like to connect with others who are also blogging about this. Does that mean I should tag every post with "lifelong learning" or perhaps lifelonglearning? Or am I missing the point about tags. I've read your suggested background reading, but I get confused about the granularity - if that's the right term - of tags.

Much appreciated!

Shanta

#2 13 March 2005 - 02:09

dear howard:
can you make more templates for those of us who have no idea about how to program or do any fancy html "manual" stuff?
i'm finding that i want more of a selection of stuff with pictures.
or is this easier to alter than i realized?
kh

fabric

#3 13 March 2005 - 10:25

First off, yes, we are currently working on new templates!

It's pretty easy to switch out pictures, if that's all that you want to do. You need to have an account with one of the photo-hosting sites, or have ftp access to your own server, in order to accomplish this.

Read the FAQ in the manual about photo posting, and go to the template blog and ask to join to post any specific questions you have about how to do this.

howard

#4 13 March 2005 - 10:28

BTW, to see what some of the most popular "standard" tags are in this moment, check out: http://del.icio.us/popular

howard

#5 13 March 2005 - 10:38

Shanta, I would recommend tagging all your posts with the separate single-word tags: learning, lifelong, education. You should visit del.icio.us, register and submit your blog with those tags. Tecnorati probably has something similar, but I don't have time to look right now.

We are looking into how to better integrate our tags with the greater blogoshpere. It's a shifting landscape and a bit technical, so it'll take a little while to figure out...

howard

#6 14 March 2005 - 19:45

Thanks, Howard. Suddenly I get it...several specific tags.

Shanta

#7 04 March 2006 - 12:28

Howard:
Is there any way to delete or change a tag? Mispellings happen.

saintonge

#8 30 March 2006 - 22:48

Hello, Howard, you old doinker (I added 'doinker' to my tags, just in case you want to find this comment some day);
Do tags have any influence outside of the Mo'time community, or are we all sitting here in the same lifeboat trading tags with each other and nobody else?

coopergreen

#9 31 March 2006 - 01:09

saintonge: sorry about the late answer... I somehow missed the comment.

Yes you can correct tags by going to Blogs->My Blogs -> Tags. On that page you will see all your tags, and an edit link for each one...

coop: oink oink, doink doink.

the tags can also be recognized by aggregation sites and services such as technorati -- but you must register your blog with them in order to be found within their directories. get it?

by the way -- you need to upgrade your template by going to the "browse" link in the Blogs->Template menu... your posts are tagged, but the tags are not visible under your posts or in a separate menu on your blog. Your template pre-dates the Mo'time era of tags.

howard

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