[thelist] Fwd: tags in blogs per The List email you sent

[Bernardo Escalona-Espinosa]

Hello Steven!

Many thanks for your reply, I will forward it to the list so that
everyone can benefit, and I hope you get the problem sorted out :)

A comment about 1:
You are right, it is very silly that "the" would become a keyword.
However, most of the systems I've seen use one-word tags. It wouldn't
be that hard to remove common usage words like "the" and "a" from the
tag list. Of course if I am the one adding the tags I can just
remember not to use those words. Functionally speaking I don't think
it would be so terrible to have 2 tags - "back" and "future" - instead
of "back to the future". Maybe even better?

Berns

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven Streight <steven.streight at gmail.com>
Date: Aug 11, 2006 8:02 PM
Subject: tags in blogs per The List email you sent
To: escalonab at gmail.com


Hi Berns:

You emailed the Evolt List, but I cannot seem to get my emails through
this list, so I am responding personally back channel.

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

-- 
___________________________________________
Bernardo Escalona Espinosa
  handy: 0176 / 24 82 35 34
  http://www.bernsonline.com/