Quite some people have asked me what these tags are actually all about. Most of them agreed that the tag cosmos looks really nice and all but the purpose of it all seems utterly unclear. Therefore I figured it's a good idea to write some explanation as for what one can really do with tags.

Affiliate program available

Sites using tags

First of all, tags aren't my invention. I've first seen them on Technorati and also on del.icio.us. Technorati is the key website behind the whole tags game. It's the website that ties all of us bloggers together. As you all know, you can ping so called update trackers when you've published a new entry on your weblog. After the ping your site appears high in all kinds of last-updated lists. Technorati however, does much more. After receiving a ping it visits your site and scans your newly posted entry for tags. A tag is a link with a special attribute: rel="tag". When this attribute is present in a link on your page, Technorati knows you intended to file this entry under that specific tag. A full example:

If Technorati scans your page and finds this tag, it will be listed under the Google Tag Page. An excerpt of your posting will actually appear there.

The tag cosmos on several sites

All tags on Technorati appear in their Tag cosmos. This is a realtime overview of what bloggers all around the world are writing about.

A similar thing happens at del.icio.us. This site also hosts a tag cosmos. Here the tags aren't grabbed from people's weblogs but from what people submit on their own personal del.icio.us bookmark page. An example of such a bookmark page is my del.icio.us page. At del.icio.us, users can keep their bookmarks organized by.... tags! It also allows visitors to browse the tags and thus all bookmarks submitted by people all around the world. With that, del.icio.us also created it's own Tag cosmos. On Technorati the cosmos is about what people write on blogs, on del.icio.us it's about what people bookmark. Both sites result in a really nice representation on what's currently 'hot' on the internet as a whole.

Flickr.com is yet another variation on the theme. Here it's not about blog postings or bookmarks but about photo's. Users all around the world can tag photo's on they websites to be added to Flickr.com's tag cosmos. You can see their tag cosmos here.

My local tag cosmos

As you've seen, the different examples show that a tag cosmos is a representation of 'what's going on' on the net, related to three different things. Now if you click on this link you enter my own local tag cosmos. This is exactly the same thing as Technorati's cosmos except for one thing: mine is limited to postings on this weblog. In one glimpse of the eye my tag cosmos gives a pretty good impression as for what this weblog is all about. A large tag in the cosmos indicates this tag has been used in quite a lot of postings: it's an important tag, a 'hot' subject on my blog. On Technorati it means it's a hot subject on the interhet as a whole. I hope you'll get the picture.

How is the tag cosmos created?

With the Tagggerati extension I recently released for Pivot you can easily organize your blog postings with tags. By simply adding a code around words you want to tag in your posting, the word becomes a tag. If the tag already existed the new posting is added to the tag. If it didn't it will be created. Since most posts use more than just one tag we can also see the relations between different tag. We can generate a list of tags that appear in postings that also have the particular tag we're investigating. We can also generate a list of other postings that also have a particular tag in it. With this we can create a rich interconnected weblog in which any posting can link to any other posting as long as it has some relevance in relation to the original posting.

Taggerati

The Taggerati extension enables Pivot users to easily add tags to their postings. Under the hood it creates the tag cosmos and several lists of links to related entries and other tags. It also generates your tag cosmos. Finally, clicking on a local tag on my weblog brings you to a page with an overview of what's going on at technorati, flickr and other sites about the tag you clicked on. The end result is an extremely 'connected' weblog with loads of internal and external links to relevant resources.

Happy tagging!

testtag