How to use Technorati tags in blog posts

Background

OK, so you may have noticed the cute little tags I have at the bottom of my blog posts now. If you click on them it takes you to a page that lists a bunch of recent blog posts by different people with that same tag, so if you click on the CBC tag, it takes you to a bunch of different people writing about good ol' CBC. This is the same idea as the tags on my del.icio.us links page, where I have tags like Apple, Economics and Music.

Here are a couple of Slashdot articles on tags: Technorati Does Tags and Folksonomies In Del.icio.us and Flickr.

How to Insert Tags in Your Posts

This is really easy. Just bookmark the link found here, (via Annekenstein.) I have it as one of my bookmark bar items in FireFox:



In FireFox just go to View -> Toolbars -> Bookmarks Toolbar (so it's checked), and then just drag the above link onto the toolbar. (You can bookmark your other commonly-visited pages this way too.)

Then, when you're writing your blog post, at the end just click on the 'Technorati Tags' bookmarklet (or go to that item in your Bookmarks menu). A popup box will appear asking you to type the tags in. Just type something like “Fantasy Fiction Writing” (if you are Sabrina ;) ) (don't use commas, just spaces, to separate the tags). Then press Enter.

Next, you'll see a box with some text already hilighted. Press Ctrl-C to copy this text, press Enter again to make the box go away, and then press Ctrl-V to insert the tag code into your blog post.

I think tags are a very cool way to organize things, and not as confining as having to pick from a long list of items. It's a much more organic, bottom-up approach which I find very appealing.
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Tags