My amazing son just made BuzzMachine a tag machine. Via a nifty WordPress plug-in he adapted, instead of my old, inflexible categories, I now have fluid tags that appear at the top of every post. These include the old categories — now converted to tags — as well as any new words as they occur to me.
Now if I want to get fancy….
: I wonder whether I should do anything to make these tags work for Technorati et al (see the post below).
: It would be neat to see whether anyone linked to a post here in Del.icio.us or some of its competitors so I could import those tags here (under the assumption that your tags are better — more descriptive, more accurate, more useful — than mine).
By the way, I was inspired to do this by what Nick Denton did to his blogs. For commercial sites, there are added benefits to this structure of navigation:
: I’ll be you increase page views per visit because readers can find more on a topic that interests them.
: When readers do go to that tag page, it’s tremendously targeted and better for advertisers.
: The tags themselves should be useful for automated ad targeting via Kanoodle, Google Adsense, et al.
: The tags should be useful in informing search (if you search for a word that happens to be a tag, you would want posts using that tag to have priority).
Tags are not the cure to acne. The current infatuation with them is a bit faddish. But don’t let that distract you from their value.
: UPDATE: Dave Sifry says the tags are being picked up by Technorati as is. Bravo! And in relation to the open tagging discussion below, note that the tags don’t address Technorati; they are open.
: UPDATE UPDATE: Kevin Marks corrects me in the comments and says they are not open. I frankly don’t understand. I need a whiteboard….
