We recently started tagging posts on our blog and added a tag cloud to our archives. I’d written previously about tags, when Zeldman compared them to mullets. Tagging is assigning keywords to posts and is often called a folksonomy. A tag cloud is a visual depiction of the tags used on our blog. Tags are visually weighted in a tag cloud to indicate frequency of use. Selecting a tag within the cloud will lead to a results page showing entries associated with that tag.
An analogy is searching an entire card catalog in a library or viewing a list of the most active books. Tags have their limitations, as Zeldman so aptly wrote, but it allows our readers to see a snapshot of the content on our blog.
Business Tagging
Our tags are made possible by Tags.app, a Movable Type plugin that generates the cloud and associations automatically. Tags.app was coded by Tim Appnel and his firm, Appnel Internet Solutions. You can also see the plugin in use on O’Reilly’s Radar and Union Square Ventures. I asked Tim about business tagging and he said
As for business there are a lot of unstructured data being generated through out these organizations that gets rather lost or is hard to find. Tagging along with weblogs can improve this situation by giving users a better lens to see their data/content through.
When tagging, bloggers aren’t constrained by a category system and freely associate tags with their posts as they wish. In the tag cloud, they can can see what they’re posting on and that maybe the greater benefit of tags because the bloggers understand the folksonomy. They are the “folks” that created the tag taxonomy on an intranet, blog, or even an ecommerce site.
Tags become potentially valuable to business, when a customer can view the top sellers in all categories, weighted by the most activity and interest and buy more product. Or when employees can see what’s being posted about on the intranet and quickly find what they need.
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