Now that you know that tagging is basically an informal sort of people’s subject heading assigned by those who uploaded the content (blog entries, or videos, pictures, audio) being described, let’s see how these can be used to advantage. From a library-centric perspective, one might be forgiven for thinking that loosely assigned tags are woefully inexact for searching in comparison to the standardised descriptive capabilities of Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH). Each, however, has its good and bad points.
Where LCSH are uniform, consistent, and can be relied upon for exacting results in virtually any library catalogue, they are created by a highly centralised structure resistant to the whims of linguistic fashion. Consequently, new concepts and terminology can take years to come into LCSH use, if ever. The emphasis of tagging (as of blogging itself), on the other hand, is on timeliness. Blogs exist as a continuously updated medium, focusing on events—whether in one’s personal life or in the wider world—as they happen. Library of Congress subject headings would not only lack the nimbleness to adequately describe this fast-changing environment, but would also mean the blogging public would have to consult and attain a working knowledge of an imposing four-volume set of librariana. Tags allow content to be categorised on the fly, and while accuracy then becomes dependent on the descriptive skills of the particular ‘tagger’, the content is mounted and categories assigned in a time befitting the up-to-the-minute nature of the blogosphere.
Blog- and tag search engines (such as Technorati, TagJag, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! My Web, IceRocket, Feedster…), then, search these assigned tags (as well as keywords in the text of blog entries) to produce their results. But how do blogs, which might be updated several times a day, address the issue of having their content found by these search engines? Normally, as most of you are probably aware, search engines routinely send out ‘spiders’ or ‘webcrawlers’ to index Web page content, enabling it to be found in a search. Even the most widespread spidering effort would, by itself, be inadequate to the indexing of blogs, as it would at best re-visit pages every few days.
Unlike Web page authors who are dependent on the speed and thoroughness of each search engine’s spider, bloggers can take matters into their own hands and notify the blog search engines whenever they’ve posted a new entry, through a process called pinging. Bloggers can manually notify whichever blog search engines they like, or the blog can be set up to ping the chosen engines automatically each time there is a new post. Pinging usually results in new entries becoming searchable on the same day, thereby lending blogs a currency that static HTML pages can only dream of.
Exercise
The exercise for this Thing is pretty straightforward: You’ll manually notify Technorati (competing with Google Blog Search, of course, for blog searching supremacy) of a blog entry you’ve just completed , as well as the multi-engine notifier Ping-o-Matic. Then check a few of the blog search engines mentioned in this exercise to see how soon they’ve logged your pinged entry.
Go here to manually ping Technorati. Then go to Ping-o-Matic and manually ping any of the listed search engines, or all of them by clicking on CHECK COMMON. Wait at least an hour, then go back to the Ping-o-Matic page and click ‘link’ next to a few of the search engines on which you’d like to test the success of your pinging. Enter some keywords from your most recent blog post and note which engines have already logged your entry. Report your results in a new post!
If you’d like an additional challenge, set up your blog to ping Technorati automatically. Return to Technorati and follow the directions labelled Automatic Ping.
Further reading
“The ringmaster of the blogosphere” in The Guardian
