May 24, 2005
One Million Distinct Tags, 14 Million Tagged Posts
This weekend, Technorati reached another milestone, our millionth indexed tag. It amazes me that since we launched our service to track tags on blog posts on January 17th of this year, there has been an explosion in the use and understanding of tags. Here's a recent AP article on tags, if you're new to the phenomenon.
Beyond a million distinct tags, there's also a lot of bloggers tagging posts. At the moment of the 1 millionth blog, we had tracked 14.2 Million tagged blog posts. 14.2 Million tagged posts in just over 4 months, that's a lot of posts.
So what's a tag? Simple. It is a simple user-generated category for something. Technorati wasn't the first to catch onto the idea of tagging - sites like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Furl were already doing it when we jumped in. Simply put, tags make it easier to self-organize the web. I like to use tags as a kind of dynamic web magazine, with posts, pictures, and bookmarks that all relate to a particular topic or event - for example, Ireland, or poetry, or a conference like Etech or PDF. People are using them to note product information and reviews, like for ipods and thinkpads, and they are tagging in a variety of languages - there's even a power law distribution for popular tags.
How do Technorati tags work? Well, there's a couple of ways that we index tags in blog posts. One way is to use a Subject or Category in a popular blogging tool like Movable Type, WordPress, or Typepad, or in a popular CMS like Drupal. That will add the tags to your RSS feed, which Technorati will process. Alternatively, you can include special links inside of your posts (as I do in my posts), which give the additional benefit of making it easy for your readers to pivot on the tag you specify and get more information. Tools like Ecto make this kind of tagging a total breeze, simply checking off a few boxes in the composition window, and people have created simple bookmarklets to easily cut-and-paste tags into your posts, too. there's even automated tag creation tools. The linking mechanism isn't the only way to do tagging, and Tantek is spearheading our efforts to work with anyone who wants to tag and add metadata to their posts, we are completely agnostic about this, I only want to see more people out there tagging.
If you haven't played with tags yet, have a look at the most popular tags on the main tags page or start tagging using your favorite tool or bookmarklet. I think you'll find that it is fun, easy to do, and adds value to your readers. And hey, it helps get indexed better by search engines as well, not a bad thing overall.
If there's anything that we at Technorati can do to help make your experience with tags better, please don't hesitate to leave a comment, or drop us a line at support@technorati.com. I'm pretty sure we've eliminated some of the early beta bugs, and that things should be working pretty reliably, but we're a small group of folks, and we don't catch everything. We're working hard to be of service, please send comments and feedback - we're always looking to improve.
Technorati Tags: blogosphere, ecto, givingthanks, gratutude, statistics, stats, tags, technorati, thanks, wow
Posted by dsifry at May 24, 2005 1:30 AM
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Thanks for that very useful summary of tags and tagging. The whole folksonomy movement is one of the highlights of the web for me. Personal media and the democratic voice are now coming of age with the blogosphere. The forces that seek to bring it all "under control", for whatever reason, are mustering their forces. Tagging is another way of cocking a snook at them. More strength to your arm.
Thanks to Technorati tags. We are a small group of bloggers from Pune, India and we have started tagging our posts with a tag 'PuneBlogs'. I am sure that's going to help us in the long run.
Hi Dave
I really do love your service and am sure the tagging features will also be useful. Are there any upgrades in the works to increase the reliability of the basic service or should we just sit tight?
Dave - I have struggled for weeks to get Technorati to recognize my blog, All This ChittahChattah (chittahchattah.blogspot.com) - it has been stuck at
Claim successfully embedded. Please ping us to confirm your claim.
for quite a while.
I have pinged. And I have posted. And pinged again. And written support. And posted on bloggerforum.
The pings have been accepted. And nothing has changed.
Support has never responded.
Bloggerforum produced only reports from others who have their problems being claimed or indexed.
So this posting stands in ironic opposition to my own experience. Today I returned to the site before posting this comment, and pinged my blog again, only to get an error "he URL you entered is not a claimable blog. Please check the URL and try again."
There's been enormous buzz about tagging, but if the service doesn't work for all, or most, or is at least fixable, then it really hampers the value, and it leaves one rather cynical about the claims being made. Grumpy philosophizing aside, it'd be great if someone could sort this out. It'd be great if an email to support was answered - thanks.
Congratulations on another milestone reached! I haven't had any recent problems with tagging. (I have had problems with blog claiming, but that's a different issue.)
I would like more options for searching on tags. For example, I searched on flickr yesterday for photos tagged as "tux" and as "linux." It was very easy (and you can see some of the results at my blog). I'd like to be able to do the same search on the "world live web."
Congratulations - Technorati is a great service, and you've really helped spearhead the "tagging" movement. I'm afraid I'm having the same problem as Steve, above. I've been dutifully tagging my posts, and pinging Technorati, but they never show up on your site under the tag. I've written four or five times to tech support but no one gets back to me.
Sorry to complain! Like I said, Technorati is great - and I'll check some of the tools you listed above.
Keep up the good work!
Cheers!
Blogbus.com contributes thousands of Chinese tag.
Andrew : I've noticed that tagged posts can move quite quickly down the list once they're on it. It's very easy to miss them if you don't check regularly. It's true the timing can vary from day to day, but I'm sure all my tag posts have gone through the system.
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