How to Properly Tag Netscape posts
I’d like to share some tips for others on how to properly tag Netscape posts properly. The benefits of tagging is that it benefits everyone for finding their information and related articles easily. I will highlight good examples of Tagging and examples of what not to do.
What is tagging? Tagging is the term used to classify something, such as a story. Tagging is also known as Meta Data, like the extra details. Tagging itself is designed to link related things together with one link. I’ll let Wikipedia help me here:
A tag is a keyword or descriptive term associated with an item as means of classification by means of a folksonomy. Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by the author/creator of the item — i.e. not usually as part of some formally defined classification scheme. Tags are typically used in dynamic, flexible, automatically generated internet taxonomies for online resources such as computer files, web pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks (both in social bookmarking services, and in the current generation of web browsers - see Flock and Mozilla Firefox 2.0x). For this reason, “Tagging” has become associated with the Web 2.0 movement.
Typically, an item will have one or more “tags” associated with it, as part of some classification software or system. The software will provide links to other items that share that keyword tag, or even to specified collections of tags. This allows for multiple “browseable paths” through the items which can quickly and easily be altered by the collection’s administrator, with minimal effort and planning.
Now how do we properly tag?
Tagging involves the classification of items. So topics can include the specifics, then the niche, then the general category. Personally, I like to tag from detailed to general. Tagging should mainly consist of one word, a keyword if you will. It’s like you are writing the index of a book, and you want to think of one word that will be related to this story.
Here’s a good example of what I used to tag a story:
Net simul-attacks expose US security holes
Simulated internet attacks in the US have uncovered gaps in the nation’s cybersecurity defences. In particular, cyber-defenders struggled to understand if simulated hack attacks were isolated or part of a more co-ordinated assault.The four-day cyber-war exercise, conducted in February and the biggest such exercise to date, tested the US government’
Channel: Technology | Tags: Security Vulnerability Government Hacking Simulations
I posted a story that was about government security and simulated hacking attacks. I tagged with general terms like Government, Hacking, Simulations. See how I tagged with fairly general terms. Now if people click one of those tags they will find all stories with the same tags. Nifty, eh?
A poor example of tagging:
Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 unleashed
Mozilla released a second beta version of its upcoming Firefox 2.0 browser on Thursday. The release is targeted at developers and intended to generate more feedback while also incorporating a number of bug fixes contained in the Beta 1 version of the code, released in July.Channel: Technology | Tags: Firefox
I posted a story about the new Firefox 2.0 beta. I had a lack of tags, although accurate with “Firefox”, I could have improved the tagging and list “Mozilla, Web Browsers, Internet” as well. The reason this is not good is because there is not enough tags to classify the story. Sometimes I forget to tag a lot and just submit the story; but overall the more tags, the better. A further example of tagging again, is my Technorati tags down below.
So now that I shared a good and bad example of tagging. I think top contributors should tweak up on their Tagging abilities and offer better tags for stories so we all can read up on related stories. Tagging will increase the relevance of the tags themselves when they are tagged properly.
‘Scape on
[tags]Netscape, Tags, Tagging, Web 2.0, Internet[/tags]
