PUBLIC MARKS from Morgaine

According to Internet research firm Jupiter Media Metrix, only four web sites account for 50 percent of all online minutes. Simply put, this is very sad. We, in the independent web community, still have a lot of work to do. It is becoming exceedingly difficult for independent web sites to receive any notoriety, or for the average surfer to even know we exist.

Why do some weblogs attract large numbers of readers while others operate with near invisibility? Why do the same weblogs get linked to time and time again?

Pointless quizzes, stupid quizzes, funny quizzes, quizzes all around ...

-:- Nono, I'm no addict, I'm a power user -:-

Generally, social bookmarks are understood as bookmarks that allow a public administration. Furl, Spurl and del.icio.us are three well-known services, actually free of cost for the member. What are they able to do?

Tagging as it is used at some of the Web's most interesting and lively new sites is launching a revolution of self-organization on the Internet. You could call it the latest twist in the ongoing evolution of social networking software. Except there's a difference: On social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster, people join, and then declare their alliances to each other explicitly. On sites that employ tagging, the networks emerge, implicitly, out of the shared interests of users. Order isn't proclaimed, it just happens.

We benefit from folksonomies as the both the personal vocabulary and the social aspects help people to find and retain a tether to objects on the web that are an interest to them. Who is doing the tagging is important to understand and how the tags are consumed is an important factor. This also helps us see that not all tagging is a folksonomy, but is just tagging. Tagging in and of its self is a helpful step up from no tagging, but is no where near as beneficial as opening the tagging to all. Folksonomy tagging can provide connections across cultures and disciplines (an knowledge management consultant can find valuable information from an information architect because one object is tagged by both communities using their own differing terms of practice). Folksonomy tagging also makes up for missing terms in a site's own categorization system/taxonomy. This hopefully has made things a little clearer for all in our understanding the types of folksonomies and tagging and the benefits that can be derived.

Give me a Flickr feed, give me a del.icio.us feed, give me a main post feed. Heck, give me a combined feed of all of it too; in some cases I and others will even prefer that, just don’t make that the only option if at all possible.

Ads in RSS are fundamentally misguided, at least all the examples I've seen. They're either a site-wide sponsor or a completely unrelated product, but the thing that is broken about them is that they don't offer anything to the reader.

Then I started thinking: since Flickr and Del.icio.us and Technorati are encouraging everyone to tag their content, it follows that the tag-aware RSS reader will be the next step. I should be able to browse through the stream that my RSS reader has captured using the tags assigned to the individual entries.

This is a introductory guide to "tags" on Technorati, the blogosphere search engine, which started using them in mid-January 2005. It's a practical introduction rather than a tutorial (ending with some personal thoughts about tags), but I'll summarise the basics about Technorati tags and how to use them in your own blog posts - stuff I've learned from digging around, playing around and, as you'll see later, much tearing out of hair.

Extreme Programming (XP) is actually a deliberate and disciplined approach to software development. About eight years old, it has already been proven at many companies of all different sizes and industries world wide.

Which are the best and most effective ways to make your blog or independent news site return a profit?