RSS allows you to subscribe to the ideas and conversations within the filtered web of social networks. Blogs themselves are filtering tools because each blog is under the control of a real person who acts as a content gatekeeper who publishes content they personally decide is relevant to their given audience.
When that blog becomes a trusted source of content it also becomes the news filter for it's audience. Users know that a blog will give them timely content that is on target and immediately useful. There is no need to wade through unnecessary content or irrelevant messages.
Social Networks is a alternate term used to commonly describe the new face of the web...BLOGS. Blogs as social tools communicate ideas virally across the Internet because they are highly personal-styled communications tools that work as digital conversation from person to person and between groups of people that share the same or similar interests.
Blogs are highly influential tools in the pubic discourse because they represent democratized ideas and unmediated expressions that are more credible then mainstream media communication that is often filtered by the few who decide what's best for the many consumers out there. Marketing messages are also at a power loss because any sponsored message is suspect from the start.
Consumes are now controlling personal access and decision making power on the Internet. For example, if you are planning on seeing a movie you no longer take the word of a movie critic at face value but you also test that message against the opinions of your peers. You read user reviews and talk to friends and family. Ultimate your social network passes an opinion to you about the credibility of the movie critic and more importantly they pass on to you an evaluation of the movie itself.
You end up deciding when, where and how you will see the movie after first tapping into your social network where the information has higher influence, higher perceived value and helps you exercise personal choice with greater precision.
You will go see the movie based on the opinions of your peers that have the most value and credibility to you. That is social networking. That's blogs at work. One blog publishing an idea that is picked up and passed on to other blogs with each blog communicating that idea to multiple readers at a time.
People gather along common lines of interests and blogs reflect that. The excitment of socializing ideas is the process of exercising influence and discovery. We all like to share ideas and have them validated and we all like to discover new ideas from others who we share our same interests with.
This process of influence and discovery is why blogs are naturally viral and attract links. In the blogosphere we write about our interests as part of the process of exercising influence and we link to lots of other great content as part of the discovery process throughout the blogosphere. This both builds credibility which increases influence while share our enlightened moments without others by reference our journey and crediting sources.
We are sharing ideas in real time. Now we are seeing technology develop that allows us to filter information more accurately and with greater satisfaction in the socializing of ideas and sharing common interests. One technology for doing so is called tagging or tags.
Tags Are Tools Of Social Tools
Tagging represents a new way to filter and categorize the web even further than we already can. But it also represents a new level of viral socialization. Technorati.com has implemented a new tagging service which makes use of Flickr and Del.icio.us.
The best example of tags are indeed Flickr and Del.icio.us. Flickr is a photo sharing service that uses RSS and tags. RSS allows you to share and subscribe to photos and tags allow you to categorize photos by added terms or names to the photos.
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking system that works in similar manner. Del.icio.us doesn't us photos but it does allow you to collect links as your surf the web and then assign names to the links to categorize them. You can collect links that fall under a category called blogs or programming. The thing is that you assign whatever name you think of naturally. That category is then visible and shareable with others using Del.icio.us. Others can read your categories and subscribe to them as your bookmarked list are publicly visible.
Technorati is leading a new charge to tag the World Live Web or blogosphere and we are all pretty jazzed by the implications of this and possibilities.
Technorati Tag pages combine tags from Flickr and Del.icio.us plus tagged content from the Technorati search results to for a tagged page. An and example of which can be seen here: Business Blogging.
I simply used the following URL http://www.technorati.com/tag/Business%20blogging and Technorati.com showed me what content had been tagged as business blogging. You could also go the Technorati.com search box and type in tag:business blogging.
This may be a bit heady for new and beginning bloggers and I would say not as important to you right now but for blogging veterans this is something to watch and implement right away.
Tags allow bloggers to increase the value of individual posts within a blog by driving greater value into a topic at at large. An example could be if I write a post about "rc cars" on my remote controlled toys blog and I tag that post specifically with "rc cars".
That post has just become much more searchable within my niche and adds another way for my content to be located and used by contributing to a specific information cluster about rc cars that is gathering beyond my blog dicussion.
I've already looked through De.licio.us and witnessed how this blog has been virally socialized as one person bookmarks and article under certain tags and others then share that same lists of bookmarks.
Back the example above on rc cars, now I can reach out with a specific post to the niche beyond my connected audience. By using a specific term that will allow my post be aggregated under the term "rc cars" in Technorati I can reach others more specifically.
One results is the increased value of an individual post and another result is that I can benefit by driving interest back to my blog on remoted controlled toys which has tightly related topics of interest to someone looking for rc cars.
As the use of tags grows, new information clusters will form within the greater blogosphere via Technorati and tags will be a way of adding your content to these clusters. The idea of tags is to socialize and aggregate interests across blog posts and add a virtual layer (if you will) that kind of abstracts an additional layer of relevancy from the blogosphere that is searchable based on these named clusters of information called tags
This is yet another way to drive relevancy into the blogosphere and it's fantastic and filter it.
Here's some additional big benefits from this. Technorati will soon start offering RSS syndication of these tagged content lists. Now you can get your content aggregated within additional social networks by using a simple tag to reach out to them. Your tag will identify your content and Technorati will categorize your content under that term or name. For example I want to increase the reach and visibility for an article on podcasts so I tag my post like this:
< a href="http://technorati.com/tag/podcast" rel="tag" >podcast< /a >
Please not the < > have been spaced for readability here.
Tag and ping Technorati.com and your done. Your content will be indexed and tagged in Technorati for the term you've assigned.
I am already imagining some personal and business benefits of this development. I will write about them at a later time. In the meantime I'll refer you to some of my colleagues who are doing a fantastic job of publishing content on tags and let them define it much more clearly. I will also post additional information on tags in the near future. What does this all really mean for you down the road? I'm not completely sure but as I said I will venture a guess in another post in the near future
What Some Of My Friends and Fellow Bloggers Are Saying
I've been fortunate enough to come into the presence of some of the most influential and professional bloggers on the 'Net right now. Here are some snippets from just a few of them on the subject of Technorati Tags.
Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing Group has published some coverage on tags from which I've further found additionally fantastic content.
Paul says:
Technorati is building the blogosphere one tag at a time. A tag is simply a category name which people use to categorize their posts, photos, and links.
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting has excellent coverage. You should definitely read his post. He has a good grasp of this new development and has been instrumental in introducing me to this very important development for all bloggers.
Tris says:
Why is tagging important? Well I think the explosive popularity ofFlickr anddel.icio.us really show us why. People like to categorize things and like to read about/see pictures/bookmarks from people who are also interested in these things. It is another extension of social networking. And it will be the next wave to expand the blogsphere and make it even more useful.
Jon Husband who is also and fellow blogger of mine has published Technorati and Tags which concisely talks about tags and their usefulness at the Qumana Blog.
Joh says:
David Weinberger (and others) are posting about Technorati's new service, which will help facilitate the bottom-up surfacing, or "emergence" of blog posts that may be attractive to someone looking for interesting and useful blog posts...
It will be very interesting to see what develops of all this ... less hierarchical, less top-down driven expertise, and more surfacing of expertise and knowledge from the Long Tail. And very wirearchical, in my opinion. But we would think that, no ?
Additional Must Read Reference
Technorat.com:
What's a tag?
Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense.
Read more...Using Technorati Tags
Corante.com
This is exciting to me not only because it’s useful but because it marks a needed advance in how we get value from tags. Thanks to del.icio.us and then flickr in particular,hundreds of thousands of people have been introduced to bottom-up tagging: Just slap a tag on something and now its value becomes social, not individual. As these tags are added willy-nilly, two issues arise: We want to get more value from them and we want to work out the scaling problems it’s one thing when there are 30 things tagged with weasels and another when there are 300,000. A site like Technorati, which already gets its value as an aggregator, is in a good position to innovate around both issues. Read more...Technorati Tags: Take 2
John's Jottings
Technorati has released today a new feature called tags which allows one to further categorize the web. Mix Flickr and Del.icio.us tags with weblog tags and you get a Technorati Tag page, which looks like this which is the page for the tag technorati.
The basic premise is you tag your articles just like people tag pictures in Flickr or links in Del.icio.us. Click here for more on Technorati Tags In Movable Type
I included this last reference because I thought it was pretty cool for the Movable Type blog software users to be aware of this tag mod that works with Movable Type.
[EDITED 1.15.05 12:05pm EST]
