Visits to a Wordpress class blog skyrocketed when I tagged a post "Google ads." I couldn't understand what was going on until classmate and co-worker Leslie Wilkinson helped me navigate through some of Wordpress' tagging search.
We're in an online class together through the University of North Carolina's journalism school, which offers a certificate in technology and communication.
Leslie wrote a post about the Wordpress features at her class blog. Pardon our self-absorption: we're learning, learning, learning.
A reciprocal link from a smart blog about cognitive psychology helped too.
The event shows the need to provide taxonomy and tags to the zillions of bytes of information we're pouring into the Internet bucket. People seek organization and structure in the world, and we benefit through increased traffic if we help people find our stuff.
As we go forward, I hope reporters and photographers -- the stuff generators -- realize the potential of giving their work some organization and tagging from the beginning, and we spread the work. Taxonomy isn't just for librarians and copy editors anymore.
More later as we continue to learn and play tag. We promise not to tag everything with the G-word.
2 comments:
This is just an extension of the old trick of putting "breasts" in the meta tags and reaping the page views.
Not that I ever did this of course.
Tags (or keywords) have been around for a long time. That many of the MSM are just now "playing" with them is disheartening.
I got a chuckle from the cognitive blog's link. Really is tricky to call sites "best or worst" when we're evaluating for a specific reason.
Another thought I've had about the tags: I don't know of any master list of all the tags in the world. People just add their own based on what makes sense to them and things work fabulously. Amazing how a list of seemingly random words can have such great meaning without following a strict structure.
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