Tags in Blog Posts

The concept of tagging, which was popularized by services like del.icio.us and Flickr, is now commonly understood and is ubiquitous. The idea of humans tagging content to categorize it and later to find it is a simple, yet important bit of the web infrastructure. Most major blogging platforms support tags. The tags are standardized based on the rel-tag microformat. You can see the implementation on ReadWriteWeb - each post is tagged with a set of tags.

For example, one of our recent posts contains this tag:
<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/tag/twitter" rel="tag">twitter</a>
The tag has several benefits:

• Readers can instantly click to find other posts with this tag
• Search engines can better classify the content
• Semantic tools can offer additional services such as finding related content, pictures, and video

Tags are similar in principle to keywords, but provide more flexibility because they are inside the post and can have richer content. In principle, it could be possible to add more information into the keywords meta tag in the head of the document but it has existed in its current form for several decades and is thus probably not likely to change. In any case, all modern blogging platforms make it trivial to tag content, so there should be no excuses.

Standardizing Blog Templates Across Platforms

In the nineties people created web sites. These days only companies have web sites, individuals have blogs and social network profiles. There is a great opportunity to standardize and structure the information because blogs and profiles are based on templates. Consider a common structure for each blog. One or a few sidebars and the central area for the content. In the content area, on a post page there is a post body, date, author and tags - a minimum set of elements.

Why not standardize on a few things here?

• <div class="post"> - a container for the post body
• <div class="sidebar"> - a container for the sidebar
• <div class="author"> - a container for the author
• <div class="date"> - a container for the date
• <div class="tags"> - a container for the tags
• <div class="comments"> - a container for the comments

Platforms already do have very similar things in place and standardizing between them is rather simple. In no way would this be a competitive advantage or disadvantage to them, but it would be a big help towards making the web more structured. Extending on these basics, it would also be helpful if widgets were wrapped into standard enclosures. A simple widget tag can go a long way toward distinguishing widgets from the other content in the sidebar.

If blogging platforms standardized on these basic conventions, likely major newspapers would follow as well.

The situation with social network profiles is different, as the information contained in them is not public. In addition, there is a competitive advantage to Facebook in having its own proprietary structure. However, entities like the DataPortability group have been created precisely to deal with this problem and Facebook just joined. So we may yet seem some progress on that front.