For those of you out there who don’t know what tagging is, you are not alone. I myself have seen it, but still do not quite understand what it is.
Technorati is a blogging site that supports blog tagging. Using Technorati Tags explains what tagging is and how to create tags.
According to their page, “a tag is basically a category name that is used to help organize items found on the web, such as blog posts, photos, etc.” Some blogging software supports tags already. If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom feeds, publish your feeds and categories will be read as tags.
If your blog software doesn’t support categories, all you have to do is tag your post by including a link in the body of your post. Here is an example:
<a rel="tag" href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]">[tagname]</a>
The [tagname] can be anything. You do not need to include the brackets, just the descriptive keyword for your post. Just make sure to include rel=”tag” inside the anchor tag.
You can link to any web page that ends in a tag. This means that the last word in the url is the tag or category name. For example, these tag links would also be included:
<a rel="tag" href="http://apple.com/ipod">iPod</a>
<a rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity">Gravity</a>
<a rel="tag" href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua">Chihuahua</a>
To include your tag in Technorati, make sure to ping them. You can ping them manually here or set up your blog software for automatic pinging.
To see some examples of site that use tagging, follow these links: Flickr, Buzznet, del.icio.us and Furl.