let's talk about technorati tags
Most of us (by "us" I mean the people on my blogroll) have links on our blogs that take the user to our
Technorati "cosmos"—all the blogs/posts which link to our blogs/posts. For instance,
my cosmos shows a certain number of icoming links from a certain number of sources. But there's also the concept of a
category cosmos, gained through tagging. This is not unique to Technorati, as
Flickr,
del.icio.us and about a zillion other communities/aggregators/bookmark services/etc use tags to categorize content. Just as you can see
all sepia-tagged images on Flickr, you can see
all podcasting-tagged posts indexed by Technorati. Content doesn't get into a category cosmos unless it's tagged to do so; Flickr users have an option of adding tags to their images, and Technorati users can add tags to their blog posts.
I know that most of the people who read my blog (all four of you or whatever) use Blogger, so I'll show you the quick-'n'-dirty way to tag your posts. If you use MT/WordPress/TypePad or other blogging software that provides the ability to categorize tags, you can read the info here to see how your categories are automatically converted to tags and work their way into the cosmos.
Basically, you just make a link and tag the <A HREF=...> tag with the "rel=tag" attribute. "Huh?" they say in unison. Like this:
<A HREF="http://some.link.to/some_page" rel="tag">tagname_goes_here</A>
After you publish your blog post and ping Technorati, it will only be a matter of minutes (usually) for your content to be added to the category cosmos for "tagname_goes_here". The link itself, "http://some.link.to/some_page" in the example above, can be a link to wherever you want. If you are tagging a blog post about iPods with an "ipod" tag, you can use a link to "http://www.apple.com/ipod" or, what I do is simply link to the Technorati tag page itself, in this format:
<A HREF="http://www.technorati.com/tag/tagname_goes_here" rel="tag">tagname_goes_here</A>
This provides me with an easy way to jump to a category cosmos that I know I'm interested in, since I've posted something on the topic and tagged it appropriately. I also use a small font to set apart my tags from the body of the post, and I always put my tag links at the end. But font size, appearance and placement have nothing to do with the indexing that occurs on the page, so you can do whatever you want.
For example, in my post about going to see Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley at Cinequest, I tagged the post with "jeffbuckley" and "cinequest". If you follow either of those links, you'll find that (at this moment) my post is the only entrance in that category cosmos. So sad. But this post—tagged with "tags" and "technorati"—is one of many in those categories. Try it out:
technorati tags: tags, technorati
Here, I've not used the wee-sized font for the tag links, because I didn't want you to miss them. Go off and tag your posts, ping Technorati, and contribute to the real-time web. It's fun!
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