Jul 29, 04:01 pm: Ways to use tagging

  1. Store things in a way that gives you lots of paths to find them later.
    Unlike categories and folders, tags can help provide multiple ways to store (in a virtual sense) and recall information for later use. Tagging doesn’t require that you know how you may want to use this item later nor does it require that you examine one item and place it in context with all of the things you may want to get at later. One of the bes places to see this in action is at flickr
  2. Tag yourself.
    A variant of the above, tagging yourself is done predominately with use of technorati tags. Why tags instead of categories? You have hundreds of tags. Thousands. And you don’t have to figure out what they are ahead of time.
  3. Share you and your saved stuff with others.
    Del.icio.us is one of the best places to see this in action. Here are things tagged food by severbatey. Clicking on the “see food from all users” gets me, as you’d expect things tagged food from everyone. You can try the same think on flickr.
  4. Subscribe to those feeds.
    RSS goodness allows you to subscribe to these streams. Constant discovery goodness in your aggregator inbox.
  5. Republish those streams.
    You can republish your own streams—that’s what I do on this blog. You can republish certain tags—that’s what happening on the Advanced Tools Blog. You can find plugins that work with WordPress, for example. You can also use Feed Digest to easily republish any RSS feed you want to.
    Marnie Webb  |