Brought to You by the Letter ‘T’
Technorati.com’s goal is to have a finger on the pulse of the blogosphere. A few weeks back, they released this idea of ‘tags’. Tagging posts first hit my radar with Flickr, the photo sharing site. In Flickr, people add free-form tags to their photos creating a bottom-up, grassroots taxonomy or folksonomy. The end result is a living, breathing, photo-browsing system or in Technorati’s case, a living, breathing, weblog-browsing system.
WordPress supports multiple categories for posts, making categories are more like ‘flags’ (annotation) than ‘buckets’ (segregation). So, WordPress already has ‘tagging’ built in as defined by Technorati and Flickr. All it needs is a way to connect to their system.
Enter the WP-CaTT plugin. It appends a “(t)” after each of the categories (or tags) listed for a post - like this one - linking into Technorati’s Tag system.
For you, the MNteractive readers, if you’d like to see what the rest of the world considers ‘useful utilities’, click on the ‘(t)’ next to that phrase - it’s just below the title of this post.
Enjoy.
3 Comments
Garrick,
Very cool plug-in, but I see some unintended consequences of this as most of us don’t align our Wordpress categories with existing Technorati tags. For example, for my post last night for Wine Blogging Wednesday, I embedded “wine” and “wine blogging wednesday” (both existing tags) into my post using Will Flemming’s Technorati Tags plug-in. My WP categories for the post are “podcasts” (probably OK for Technorati) and “WBW” (nobody is using this one yet, for good reason). So I see a problem with your plug-in unless we all rename our categories to line up with existing Technorati tags; this might not be a bad policy, but I can see some chaos ensuing.
See you later.
Tim, you’re exactly right. For this to work, a category needs to be set up for every tag you use and the categories need to be somewhat descriptive. For category/tag reuse, this could be a good thing. This could increase the number of categories in your site. Which could be good or bad.
Based on my brief experimentation, if the tag isn’t currently in Technorati’s system, it seems to be automatically created.
Tim:
If Technorati doesn’t know your current tag, it goes ahead and makes a new one. Granted, if you are the only one on the planet using it, it won’t be much use over at Technorati ;o)