Week 6 Assignment - Tagging, Technorati, and Delicious

Tagging - I have encountered "tags" before during my internet travels, but never paid much attention to them. The tagging theme runs through many applications, e.g. Flickr, blogs, music, books (LibraryThing), etc. Tags are used to categorize and organize yourself. The interesting thing is that users themselves assign tags, making it interesting, fun, and useful. Regardless of how unorthodox a tag name you might choose, there's bound to be someone else who chose it too, hence you will find others with same tags as yourself. Another interesting concept I discovered about blog tagging was that you could tag someone else...."tag, you're it!". One blog site mentioned that it also had a tagging system whereby if you were being spammed by someone, you could tag them back with a special tag (Schmoe, in that case) and the authorities running the site would take action. I also discovered tag clouds, which gives a visually user-friendly and easy to see heirarchy of tags associated with the subject (be it photos, a blog, or whatever). Large, bold tags are the most common ones, whereas small tags are the least common.

Technorati - is a site that keeps track of blog tags. If your blog tag is recognized by this site (which can be done by pinging it) then your blog will be more visible to the world, by virtue of their using a site such as this to search for types of blog posts. I did not attempt to get this blog tagged in way or recognized by Technorati. I'm not sure if that capability is easily done on blogspot. I gather that some blog applications make it easier than others. I did read that one can manually incorporate some html directly into one's blog post, and that will generate the necessary "ping" to technorati, or something like that.

Delicious - is a social bookmarking site. Like tagging of books or photos, this site allows you to add, organize, and tag your favourite websites. And again, as in other tagging schemes, you can then see who else is tagging sites with the same tag names as you, which might lead you to sites of interest that you would not otherwise have found. I did not actually set up an account here. I did try searching on a subject of interest. I found that it came up with a number of relevant websites, but it would seem the same sites would likely have appeared had I just done a Google search using the same search words. However, linking to the tags within the results pages offers another avenue for exploring the subject, as compared to just web page hopping through the google results.