Playing Tag

You may or may not have noticed that more and more content on the web is being tagged. Tags are part of a growing effort to collectively categorize content based on keywords. This can be seen on Flickr where users can tag their photos or on Del.icio.us where users can tag their bookmarks. This is useful in that other users can then turn around and find content based on those tags. Maybe you're interested in seeing UFOs or perhaps you'd like to learn more about cascading style sheets. I guarantee you that it's been tagged somewhere. There are numerous reasons to use tags, and they have been spelled out well here and here.

Several weeks ago Technorati entered into the tagging game with Technorati tags . They are using tags found in the two sites mentioned above and in their network of blogs by using either entry categories or a special tag.

Tags and Movable Type

This is easier said than done ... with Movable Type anyway. There's a plugin out there, but those of us using dynamic pages can't use it so this is my solution. Technorati pulls their tags from the RSS feed so you don't necessarily have to make your tags visible on your site. Currently I'm using my keyword field to enter my tags. I've modified my RSS feed template to replace this:

<description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode _xml="1"$></description>

with this:

<description><![CDATA[<$MTEntryExcerpt$><p>Tags: <$MTEntryKeywords$></p>]]></description>

That's it. Ping Technorati, and they'll add your tagged entries to their new tagging system. At some point my goal is to create a php plugin that will do the same as the current perl plugin, but this works for now.

If you want to find out more, there's a great post at A Consuming Experience.