[thelist] tags in blogs

[Steven Streight]

Hi Berns.

You ask:

I am now planning to add the "tags" functionality to my site. If you
don't know what I mean, every post in my blog will have a couple of
tags - keywords - at the bottom, representing the main topics handled
in that single post. Users then will be able to click on a given tag
in order to find all the posts which have that tag.

I have now three questions and I know the answers will mostly depend
on the personal preference of each one, but I want to read some
oppinions and some reasons justifying a given preference.

1) Space-separated one-word keywords, or comma-separated multi-word
keywords?

2) Amount of keywords per post: quality over quantity, or quality over
quantity?

3) How much do users actually use the tags on blogs? Less than in
Picture galleries?


MY REPLY:

(1) NO NO NO, do NOT use "one word keywords space separated"

Why? Because then, for example, I would use "Vaspers" "the" "Grate" and that
means "the" becomes a tag! Stupid to do this, but is very common.

(2) Use just the exact keywords you need and suspect users will type in to
find your kind of info. For me, I use tags, so far, only on my YouTube video
experiments. But I go silly. I use "sleepy" and "droopy" as funny anti-tags.
Serious tags are "vaspers" and "web-usability" or "blogology" and "blogs".

(3) I rarely see bloggers using tags, but is becoming more popular. I never
click on any tags, and when I did, it was disappointing. For Flickr and
YouTube, etc., I see value. For blog posts, I see little value. A
categorized archive list in sidebar is probably better, but the jury is
still on on this one, in my mind anyway.

steven

-- 
Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate
Web Usability. IT. Social Media. Ecommerce.

http://www.vaspersthegrate.blogspot.com

http://techrepublic.com.com/5247-6257-0.html

http://blog-revolution-search-engine-swicki.eurekster.com

SKYPE: vaspersthegrate