Technorati tags

I had heard about Technorati's "tag" concept, but had mostly ignored it since my plate is rather full as it is. But then when I was working on my last post about a Sun blogger responding to negative media coverage, I noticed that a couple of simple words (rhetorical and propaganda) were hyperlinked for no apparent reason. After I finished the post I looked closer and saw that the links went to http://technorati.com/tag, which I immediately suspected must relate to this whole Technorati tag "thing".

So, without even thinking about it, I had inadvertently become a participant in the Technorati tag culture, simply by copying some hyperlinked text into my blog post. Voila! Kinda cool. This is my kind of technology.

What happens is that if you ping Technorati with your blog, Technorati will add an entry for your blog post on each of its tag pages for the terms that you tag. This should increase your in-bound links to help you get a higher Google page ranking.

Here are some Technorati tags: blog, blogging, software agent, RSS, podcasting, and entrepreneur.

Unfortunately, it's a little more complicated than simply hyperlinking a term to http://technorati.com/tag. You need to go into "Edit HTML" mode and manually insert the text rel="tag" immediately before the first closing angle bracket of the hyperlink, since that's what Technorati looks for to detect a "tag". You also need to append a slash and your term at the end of http://technorati.com/tag since that points to the Technorati tag page for your term. And finally, if your term has a spaces in it, you need to enter the spaces as %20.

-- Jack Krupansky