Other Benefits of Tagging

Last month I needed to add a quick contact form to a blog I was working on. Web forms are tricky business, anyway you slice it, building and running a web form is a complex procedure. Then I remembered that I had tagged a few web services that offered simple form development. I went to my tags for "forms" and found a bunch. Among the list was Wufoo, a site I had discovered many months before. Without having saving and tagged it I would never have remembered it. And I also saw that Wufoo had been saved by 7,701 other people--quite a recommendation. I checked them out, and ended up using them to add a quick form to the blog. Saved me a ton of time.

I could end this newsletter here and feel like tagging is an incredible leap forward. But my favorite aspect of tagging is the way it extends and improves knowledge on the fly. I frequently discover web applications, services, or informational tidbits that are helpful for all of us here at Newfangled. I could email the link to everyone, but instead we've set up some internal practices that combine the power of RSS and tagging. Suppose I see an article about how to optimize Google Analytics installations. That's something our R&D team should know about, and our project managers would benefit from the knowledge too. We have a few internal tags we all use whenever we want to share a tag with the group. Because any tag can be subscribed to via RSS anything that gets tagged with one of our internal tags instantly gets fed into all of our RSS readers. Nice!

I also subscribe to a couple universal tags. For example I subscribe to del.icio.us/tag/advertising2.0. If anyone in the world uses the tag "advertising2.0" I get it in my RSS reader.

Another way I use del.icio.us is to extend and improve my newsletters by embedding my del.icio.us tags on these pages. See that block over there on the right that says "Eric's del.icio.us bookmarks tagged: tagging." This is called a "tag roll." It's being pulled dynamically from my del.icio.us account, filtered by whatever tag relates to each newsletter's subject. In this case the subject is "tagging." So this tag roll is displaying the latest items in my list that I've tagged "tagging." If you come back to this page tomorrow and I've tagged any new pages "tagging" those new pages will display there. And I won't have to do a single thing to update my site other than add the tag to del.icio.us. This means my newsletter pages are always growing and being augmented by further information, information that changes almost everyday.