Tagging for Dummies

Technorati Profile

It used to be that simply blogging something got all the words in each blog piece indexed in technorati. A brief experiement seems to indicate that now to ever get listed you have to use "tags."

A long time ago, in 1973 to be exact, I came into contact with this process at ERIC, the Educational Research Information Center, an off-shoot of the moon shot's technology. They indexed all the technical articles for the moon shot and made it possible to search by "key words" (tags). As a proof of benefit of the space program to the earth bound, they applied the same technique to everything in written in the field of education. I used it to generate instant bibliographies for each of my college students at SFSU, crossing their individual area of specialty with technology and education. I have to wait a week for the stack of printouts, which were about 4 inches thick. My students and myself were blown away by the process, now taken for granted as a Google type search.


helicopter

Back to the future:

Keachie

this is the current model for do it yourself indexing. It is not clear to me just what to put where, so I shall experiment. For my first experiment, I have replaced tagname with the word "helicopter," dumping the brackets. This will probably fail, but the technorati instruction were not step by step.

Actually, the instructions are there:

"The [tagname] can be anything, but it should be descriptive. Please only use tags that are relevant to the post. You do not need to include the brackets, just the descriptive keyword for your post. Just make sure to include rel="tag"."

This last I read to mean, "Your religion is 'tag'."