Tags, Hags & Other Things That Go Bump In The Night by Brad
Eden
Two years ago, I wrote in my blog about tagging and the future of folksonomy. I
knew then that social tags would change the face of the internet as we knew it.
For the internet marketer, it is imperative that we continue to adapt and make
use of Web 2.0.
Technorati: There may be 100M blogs by January: If it seems like everyone has a
blog, that is not quite true. It is only a still-hefty 51.2 million people.
That is according to a new study by Technorati, the site that has been tracking
blogs, bloggers and the so-called blogosphere for several years. According to
new numbers issued by the site last week, the blogosphere has increased
100-fold over the past three years and could reach 100 million by February
2007. Technorati claims that the blogosphere now doubles every five to seven
months. Some 1.6 million blog posts are monitored every day, and about 175,000
new blogs per day pop up. About 39 percent of those are in English, while 31
percent are in Japanese and 12 percent are in Chinese languages.
Big growth for Yahoo's del.icio.us web site: Del.icio.us may not be mainstream
yet, but the social bookmarking site is getting increasingly popular among a
very desirable crowd for advertisers, young readers with six-figure household
incomes. According to data released Friday by Hitwise, the web site market
share was up 122 percent from January to July of this year, although that still
ranked just No. 6,793 in internet-wide visits. During the four weeks that ended
Aug. 5, 59 percent of visitors were male and 41 percent of those men were ages
25-34. Thirty-six percent of web site membership are from households with
incomes ranging from $100,000 to $150,000 a year, versus 13 percent for the
average internet population. Del.icio.us allows users to share links to their
favorite music, reviews, blogs and more, with some 50 categories to choose
from. It was launched in 2003 and purchased by Yahoo two years later.
Tags & Folksonomy: Latest Internet Trend There is a new branch of the Web
growing like a well organized storm cloud. This recent trend on the Web can be
used to strengthen your presence with major search engines and reach an active
audience that is highly interested in your content. Welcome to the world of
"folksonomy" and "tagging." What is Folksonomy and Tagging? Folksonomy is a
combination of the words folks and taxonomy meaning "people classification
management." This allows users some level of control over how the web is
organized. One of the most popular tools of the folksonomy concept is tags.
Tagging, in the context of this article, is the process of labeling a piece
data with metadata.
Using Tagging & Folksonomy to Advertise: Three of the most effective sites
currently using tags and/or folksonomy are: Del.icio.us, digg.com, and
technorati. Each of these sites is a major player in the folksonomy world.
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web application that is growing very fast
in popularity. With a free account, del.icio.us users can submit and access all
of their bookmarks from any computer with Internet access. By submitting and
tagging your own web pages, you instantly give access to thousands of other
users with interests in the same tags. Encouraging site visitors to submit your
selected webpages to their own del.icio.us bookmark page is a very good way to
get more exposure to del.icio.us users. Submitting to del.icio.us is instant
and it creates meaningful relevant links important to the major search engines.
Digg.com is mostly a technical news site. If you are familiar with the Web
phenomenon Slashdot, then digg will remind you of that geek culture. The
difference is that ALL of digg's content is created, submitted, and judged by
its audience. If your page, blog or online article is good enough to be "dug"
by digg users, you could receive literally hundreds of unique visitors
immediately. Virtually any participation (comments, submissions, links in your
profile) can get your site traffic from digg. The beauty of digg is that it is
so popular that many submissions to digg can instantly dominate some keywords
on search engines such as google.com.
Technorati.com is a power house in the world of tagging. If you have a blog,
Technorati should become one of your favorite search engines on the World Live
Web. Many Technorati Tags are beginning to dominate the Web by having
constantly updated, fresh blog content on highly focused subjects. The beauty
of Technorati is that blog application such as blogware and others are
completely integrated with it allowing blog categories to be instantly tagged
and syndicated into the blog search engine. Any blog can be manually added as
well to technorati's very open tagging system. Like digg, even if you only
happen to get a trickle of traffic from technorati itself many times the link
value alone will sky rocket the speed in which your site rank in the search
engines. There are many other folksonomy sites that can help you with "tag
syndication." With its encouragement to get users to submit their own RSS feeds
as content, My Yahoo! is a great way to increase traffic and links. Web
applications like TagCloud integrates RSS and tagging while wikipedia.org is
method of allowing social webpage and content development. All these methods
and many more have two great things in common 1) they are free (as of this
writing) and 2) they give the power to reshape and categorize the Web to the
people. If content is King then content management is the the kingdom.
About the Author
Brad Eden
http://www.business-idea-small.com
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