Technorati Tags and Folksonomies

Here’s something you need to know about, if you blog professionally, or just want your blog’s message to reach people as easily as possible: Technorati tags, or folksonomies. Essentially the same thing: think of Technorati tags as one brand of folksonomies. Both are more commonly known as “tagging”. Folksonomy tags act like those meta keywords you stick into an HTML page - they’re invisible to your visitors, but they tell a ping engine (most commonly Technorati) what category(ies) to put your blog in, which makes it easier for visitors to find. The code you use is this:

Just add the link you want between the quote marks: here’s the list of existing tags from Technorati. Just right-click on them to “Copy Link Location” and paste them into your tag code. This is a great way to put your blog entries in front of the very eyeballs that want to see them. Good for you, good for readers. How to put them into your specific blog entry is something that varies from one type of blogging platform to another, so you’ll have to look into that for yourself. In Serendipity (what I use), there’s a plug-in that allows you to copy the links in a row separated by commas, and it encodes them for you. If your blog platform offers no shortcuts, Technorati offers some suggestions, which I’ll summarize here: Just use the code…

[tagname]>

…replacing “[tagname]” with any descriptive, relevant category. The really important bit of code is the rel=”tag”. Then, you just need to ping Technorati - which your software may automatically do, particular if it pings Ping-O-Matic. There are a couple of issues. First, practicality. People can input anything they want as a tag category. Technorati seems to be controlling this, because their list of current tags lacks the thousands of misspellings and porn/gambling/pharm type keywords I would have expected in a blogspam free-for-all. It does contain a lot of categories whose names consist of a series of question marks, and if you click them, they all seem to contain posts with nothing but - yep, you guessed it - series of question marks. I’m scratching my head here - either there’s something naughty going on and (once again) nobody told me about it, or maybe it’s a glitch of some sort. Still… not so crazed. If their spam filters can keep up, this may just work. There’s also an ethical issue. I could list this entry in any irrelevant but highly popular category I want, unbeknownst to my visitors. It’ll screw up the quality of Technorati’s categories, In the land of plain HTML and CSS coding, it’s called “keyword spam” or “keyword stuffing”, and for a recent example of how it’s used: someone involved with WordPress recently stuffed their main site full of high-paying AdSense keywords. People stumbled onto the WordPress site looking for info on mesothelioma and the only relevant thing to their search was the AdSense ads about it - which they clicked, making money for WordPress. Since a lot of people are very sensitive about this sort of abuse, here’s a simple way to use Technorati tags openly: just tell your bloggers what ones you’re using. I’m going to be sticking mine at the bottom of each post. If you’re suspicious someone’s abused the privelege, view the source on their web page, looking for the code I listed above. That should tell you what tags they used. Note: Code corrected 4/28, thanks to the sharp eye of Arun at BetterWebMaster.