Change of plans as far as my keywords/tags project goes.
This past week, Technorati introduced a tag search to their weblog-centric search engine. Searching for a particular tag on Technorati returns a result page that aggregates recent weblog posts, Flickr photos, and del.icio.us links from across the web that use the same tag. Very nice.
This works well for me. One of the potential downsides I’d been running into with my prior plan — integrating ishbadiddle’s local keyword search — was simply that I’d gotten very used to the Flickr/del.icio.us method of separating tags with spaces, while the local keyword search required that the tags be separated with commas. As I was starting to work my way through cleaning up the keywords for my entries here, then, I’d been using spaces within keywords on the weblog (for instance, a tag of my name would be “michaelhanscom” or “michael.hanscom” on Flickr or del.icio.us, but be “Michael Hanscom” here on my weblog). I’m anal enough, though, that this bugged me — I’d rather have one consistent tagging methodology across all the systems.
As Technorati also uses the space separated tag format, and expects multiple words to be ‘smooshed’ together (just as Flickr and del.icio.us do), I’ve decided to use that system for all my tagging, foregoing ishbadiddle’s system (sorry, M E-L! — but if your system can be tweaked to read space-delimited lists rather than comma-delimited, I can look back into it again…).
Thanks to George’s TechoratiTags plugin for MovableType, I’m now listing tags in the metadata for each post, just underneath the title. The tags are drawn from the (space-separated) keywords for each entry, and clicking on any one of them will take you to that tag’s Technorati search page.
Just another way the web is getting more and more classified. Pretty cool, in my world.
“James Brown Is Dead (Wide Awake)” by L.A. Style from the album James Brown Is Dead (1991, 5:25).