Tagging Archive
Commentary by blog and social media consultant Josh Hallett on the use of blogs for public relations, media, marketing, communication & branding and from time-to-time the unsolicited opinion.
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Next week I'll be traveling to Amelia Island, FL to attend/blog the Florida Public Relation Associations' annual conference. The conference takes place from Sunday, August 6th till Wednesday, August 9th. I'll be joined by a few other folks in covering the event over at the FPRABlog.
You may remember that we launched the FPRABlog with FPRA Blog Week back in March of this year. For the past few months it has mostly been used to cover FPRA events around the state. In the next few days I'll be posting some lead-up items in advance of the conference. We invite the PR blogging community to follow along and provide commentary.
From a technical standpoint, we ask that you tag any posts: FPRA.
David Sifry has posted his latest State of the Blogosphere update. You all know the drill, go check it out.
- Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
Reading Steve's recent post about the future of newswire services such as PR Newswire and BusinessWire I can't help but think of Bob Wyman's recent post about edgeio and structured blogging. In his post Bob talks about how edgeio is differentiating itself from 'walled garden' services such as Craigslist by collecting public data and aggregating it.
This is very similar to what Steve was referring to, a new PR wire service that collects data from corporations and other sources and then aggregates/pushes it to end users. If users started tagging each release and pinging the appropriate server it could easily be done. But how is that different or any more difficult than what we can do now with Technorati or PubSub and a few good watchlists? It's not, that's the thing. If somebody would just focus some resources to made it dead-easy to use then they'd have something.
The big issue is trusting the source, we can't just have everybody issuing a corporate press release can we :-) Just ask Emulex about that. That technical issue should be a small hurdle though. The big hurdle is getting more journalists and newsrooms to use RSS.
Tom Biro tagged me on the back and made me spill my coffee this morning.
Four Jobs I've Had
- ChampionChip Race Timer
- Greens mower
- Host at the Olive Garden
- Voter Information Specialist
Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over
- Shawshank Redemption
- 5th Element
- The Professional
- Goodfellas
Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
- The Daily Show
- Absolutely Fabulous (I wrote the original FAQ back in 1995)
- Monty Python's Flying Circus
- The Young Ones
Four Places I've Been on Vacation
- Paris, France
- London, England
- Jekyll Island, GA
- Highlands, NC
Four Favorite Dishes
- Palak Sabji Dal from Passage to India
- A sandwich from Mama Dilo's Deli
- Homewrecker from Moe's
- Onion Rings from Ted's Montana Grill
Four Websites I Visit Daily
- CyclingNews
- CNN
- The Ledger
- My Stats (just being honest)
Four Places I'd Rather Be
- Highlands, NC
- Paris
- Any F1 Race
- Any Grand Cycling Tour, i.e. Giro, Tour, Vuelta
Four Bloggers I'm Tagging
- Toby Bloomberg
- Jeneane Sessum
- Marianne Richmond
- Bob O'Malley
Stowe gives Toby Bloomberg a gentle nudge to start tagging. When Toby and I met last week in Atlanta we talked about tagging. One of Toby's concern was that blogging and the tools used to create blogs are becoming too complicated.
To paraphrase (please correct me if I got this wrong Toby): Blogs started out at these easy things to use, but once the web geeks got a hold of things they started to get complicated. Add a feature here and a feature there and it's no longer a simple tool.
I agree with her. All I need to do is look over the list of plugins and hacks I have installed on MovableType. There will always be the simple tools like Blogger but MT is becoming quite the little CMS tool.
Elizabeth is fed up with tagging. She says, "Tagging is too much work." In the past few weeks I have had a number of conversations with people who share the same opinion.
Like many TypePad users, Elizabeth is limited in tagging solutions. Yes you can use your categories to tag your content, but anything further requires inserting the proper HTML into your posts.
Moving to MovableType or WordPress is the best option, but not always feasible. A few months ago I documented how I can easily tag my posts within MT.
I know that tagging my posts has led to increased traffic from Technorati and other search tools that support tags. Granted it is very easy for me include them in my posts.
Ahh homonyms, they'll sneak up on you sometimes. The other day I was checking the tag branding on Technorati. On the results page, pictures tagged branding are pulled in from Flickr. If you are used to the term branding in the marketing and communication sense, you will quickly be reminded that branding also means:
A type of body modification that is applied to the body with heat with the goal of producing an artistic and aesthetically pleasing scar.
Fred Wilson describes why Posting, Subscribing and Tagging are the three things that blogging is all about for him. It's all part of the new read/write web (you know Richard MacManus has done a good job branding himself when you can't write read/write without thinking of him)
A few friends have been having some issues including Technorati tags in their blogs so I thought I would put together a how-to of what I've done.
The simple modifications I have made to my MovableType software makes sure that any tags I include are quickly indexed by Technorati and other services that utilize tags. Using Blogger? Richard Massoner sent me a link to a Greasemonkey script that helps put tags in Blogger.com blogs.
Common Mistakes
- Include Tags in Your Post (RSS): The tags must be included in the post and not just a part of your blog template. That's the problem that MindComet has with their blog. They've just listed the tags on the blog template and not the individual post. Only content that is part of your post is included in your RSS feed. Items that are part of your blog template are not included in your RSS feed.
- Publish Full Text in RSS: If you are not including the full text of your post in your RSS feed the blog index tools will not see your tags. This is because most people put the tag code at the end of the post which is often not included in a partial feed.
- Failure to Ping: You have your tags coded correctly, you're publishing a full text feed but still nothing? You might not be pinging the blog index tools each time you publish a new post. If you are using MovableType of TypePad your blog should be configured to automatically ping Technorati. If you are unsure you can always use Ping-o-Matic!
- Technorati is Not the Only Game in Town: There are other blog search tools that are starting to use tags. IceRocket is another blog search that you can ping with your tagged posts.
Background Info
You can review Technorati's help page on Tags to get the basics. The two most important items are:
1. Including the proper code in your RSS feed or blog post
2. Pinging the blog index such as Technorati
Failure to do both of these will result in your tags not being indexed. Every time a friend contacts me with an issue it's because they have a problem with one of those items.
Continue reading "How-To Include Tags in Your MovableType Blog" »
