Technorati

It’s been a while since I added Technorati tagging to my posts, has anyone used them? Found them helpful?

I’m hoping they are providing a few good pointers to other related posts and so saving me the hassle of finding and posting the links myself, thus giving me a CBATG meets Technorati = web-based lifehack style equation.

But there is one thing that’s bugging me (of course).

One of the tags on the previous post – – is, at time of writing, a unique tag. In fact the Technorati page has this to say about it:

Congratulations, you’ve discovered a tag with no posts!

But that’s not right, is it? There IS a post with that tag, MY post! Shouldn’t it say “You’ve discovered a tag with only one post!”?? Or is it simply because it hasn’t “found” my post yet? Yes, it’s probably the latter but I’m sure the clever people there could figure out a way to differentiate between someone clicking a link, and someone searching for a tag through the technorati website.

A quick note to the Technorati guys: If you can’t figure it out, give me a shout. It’s dead easy!

All of this has gotten me thinking on folksonomies which is a big word that means a tagging system that allows people to choose their own tags – as opposed to an index system where someone else sets the tags that are available for use.

Both have their advantages, with indexes working better in a controlled environment with a rigid structure, user manuals is the obvious example, and folksonomies working better across a wide spread of information types and mediums. Hence their prevalence on blogs and photo sites (factiod: currently there are 23901 photos in Flickr that are tagged “photo“).

Of course the one downside to folksonomies is that sometimes what you would choose as a tag isn’t obvious to anyone else using the system, or, as can be evidenced in my own del.icio.us links, you don’t even stick to the same tags yourself (in my case I started out with intentions of add a year tag… er.. once… and surely I should have gone with year and month… I digress) and have to edit them your own tags ending up almost by default with an index of sorts.

The upside results in huge amounts of fun bashing in random words to any folksonomically driven search engine and seeing what it spews forth. And we know how the blogging world enjoys it’s fruitless and entertaining displacement activities.