pf » Tag: tags on Pete Freitag's Blog

A few weeks ago Kunal Anand sent me this visualization of my del.icio.us tags. When he sent it to me I was pretty busy and ended up forgetting to post it, but I was reminded today when Jon Hicks posted his.

I just noticed today that you can tag products on Amazon, check out this screen shot:

I wonder if they will be providing access to this through their API? Perhaps Jeff Barr, or someone else over at Amazon Web Services could let us know.

Of all the features that I've added to my homebrew blogging software tagging (or folksonomys) has been my favorite. Here's why:

Tag Clouds

I've designed the home page of my blog to make it easy for a first time visitor to know what my blog is about.

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Here's a little productivity tip for those of you using a bookmarking system that supports tags (such as del.icio.us).

I like to call it Action Tagging, here's how it works.

Jeffery Zeldman proclaims that tag clouds are the new mullets. However, as I'm sure you're aware some people just can't resist the mullet.

Philipp Keller has done some performance test on 4 different database schemas for storing tagged items. Although his article refers to tagging bookmarks, you can tag pretty much anything.

del.icio.us, if your not fimiliar with it, is a social bookmarking tool. I use it for two reasons, its an easy way to access my bookmarks on multiple computers, and its a great way to find new web sites.

I have mentioned it a few times on my blog (I even have a link to bookmark with del.

Since implementing tags on my blog I have noticed that they are much more powerful than categories. Here's why:

You find related items by searching for mutual tags between items. That's how I show you related posts on my blog.

As you may have noticed I recently added tags to my blog. The main reason I implemented tags was so that I could find related posts based on mutual tags. So if two posts have similar tags, they will show up in as related.

If you haven't heard of social bookmarking go and sign up for del.icio.us or furl two free social bookmark web applications.

Both of these bookmark systems allow you to tag items based on any keyword.