PUBLIC MARKS from Morgaine with tags folksonomy & tag

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.

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.