Comments on: Blog Tagging — Going Overboard

By: kurt wismer

kurt wismer — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:10:04 +0000

@alan shimel
your site only uses tags from one service so i'm not sure there's a 'tag' problem on your site – although it would probably be even better if the in-site categories used urls that ended with the word(s) you were categorizing with so that you could use those in place of the technorati tags instead of in addition to them (square bracketed example – [a href="http://www.stillsecureafteralltheseyears.com/ashimmy/vulnerability management" rel="tag"]vulnerability management[/a])… i have no idea if your blogging platform supports that however – tagging services (ie. services that say 'here, use this bookmarklet/favlet to generate tags for your blog) should all be generating tags in that format, however, and so should all be generating tags that the others can parse and index – making tagging with multiple services redundant…

as for the scripts complaint marcin made, looking in noscript shows me there is active content in your page from: typepad.com, stillsecureafteralltheseyears.com, lijit.com, criteo.com, wholinked.com, blogbeat.com, mybloglog.com, newsgator.com, histats.com, feedburner.com, technorati.com, and feeddigest.com… that's 12 (though i'm not much better with 7)… a noscript user who visits your blog for the first time will probably not know which content needs to be enabled in order to use the core functionality of it (noscript users are generally not going to enable everything)… it's up to you to decide if you have too many in there…

By: LonerVamp

LonerVamp — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:38:51 +0000

Yeah, there are sites that are just too busy, including ads between posts, at the top, on both sides, and at the bottom, tags, links, buttons, banners, widgets, and all sorts of things that simply turn me off. Then you have sites that need to link to every social network evar, have 15 RSS feed links, and ask you to digg it, reddit, kick it, poke it, pimp it, and fark it.

I like simplicity…in fact, I desire simplicity in my life, and that includes my web surfing. But, I guess to each their own, kinda like browsing really ugly GeoCiti..err..MySpace pages. Some people like the look of urine colored background and liquids (beer just does not photograph prettily on a web page background)…

By: ak

ak — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:42:14 +0000

It seems to be a new trend for a months already that blogs think they need to provide links to all the relevant tagging/social bookmarking services. IMHO, this is just wrong. When a user e.g. uses del.icio.us, he/she will usually already have the right bookmarklet in the browser toolbar, so there’s absolutely no need for such links. And I’d bet such links are hardly ever used, anyway (I saw them on quite a few blogs, never used them).

By: kurt wismer

kurt wismer — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 03:35:19 +0000

@alan shimel
your site only uses tags from one service so i’m not sure there’s a ‘tag’ problem on your site – although it would probably be even better if the in-site categories used urls that ended with the word(s) you were categorizing with so that you could use those in place of the technorati tags instead of in addition to them (square bracketed example – [a href="http://www.stillsecureafteralltheseyears.com/ashimmy/vulnerability%20management" rel="tag"]vulnerability management[/a])… i have no idea if your blogging platform supports that however – tagging services (ie. services that say ‘here, use this bookmarklet/favlet to generate tags for your blog) should all be generating tags in that format, however, and so should all be generating tags that the others can parse and index – making tagging with multiple services redundant…

as for the scripts complaint marcin made, looking in noscript shows me there is active content in your page from: typepad.com, stillsecureafteralltheseyears.com, lijit.com, criteo.com, wholinked.com, blogbeat.com, mybloglog.com, newsgator.com, histats.com, feedburner.com, technorati.com, and feeddigest.com… that’s 12 (though i’m not much better with 7)… a noscript user who visits your blog for the first time will probably not know which content needs to be enabled in order to use the core functionality of it (noscript users are generally not going to enable everything)… it’s up to you to decide if you have too many in there…

By: alan shimel

alan shimel — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 23:34:51 +0000

Ok, guilty as charged. How would you suggest using the rel-tag microformat?

By: kurt wismer

kurt wismer — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:51:27 +0000

not only is it ridiculous it’s redundant… they should all be able to recognize and index each other’s microcontent because they should all be using the rel-tag microformat for their tags…

it seems to me that most likely the person just doesn’t know how to use tags and thinks he’s got to tag separately for each service…

By: Marcin

Marcin — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:10:38 +0000

I was going to say something, but I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers just yet. I agree, when I saw it I thought, “WTF?! what’s the point of that many tags.” It’s all blog whoring ad revenue generating crap. Even Shimel’s tags/scripts is overboard. You run NoScript with Firefox? Check out how much crap NoScript blocks when you’re at his site or some of these other sites. I can understand one or two scripts at your site, but 8? 9? come on!

Someone please put a stop to this madness!