Two years ago, I wrote in my blog about tagging and the future of folksonomy. I knew then that social tags would change the face of the internet as we knew it. For the internet marketer, it is imperative that we continue to adapt and make use of Web 2.0.
Technorati: There may be 100M blogs by January: If it seems like everyone has a blog, that is not quite true. It is only a still-hefty 51.2 million people. That is according to a new study by Technorati, the site that has been tracking blogs, bloggers and the so-called blogosphere for several years. According to new numbers issued by the site last week, the blogosphere has increased 100-fold over the past three years and could reach 100 million by February 2007. Technorati claims that the blogosphere now doubles every five to seven months. Some 1.6 million blog posts are monitored every day, and about 175,000 new blogs per day pop up. About 39 percent of those are in English, while 31 percent are in Japanese and 12 percent are in Chinese languages.
Big growth for Yahoo's del.icio.us web site: Del.icio.us may not be mainstream yet, but the social bookmarking site is getting increasingly popular among a very desirable crowd for advertisers, young readers with six-figure household incomes. According to data released Friday by Hitwise, the web site market share was up 122 percent from January to July of this year, although that still ranked just No. 6,793 in internet-wide visits. During the four weeks that ended Aug. 5, 59 percent of visitors were male and 41 percent of those men were ages 25-34. Thirty-six percent of web site membership are from households with incomes ranging from $100,000 to $150,000 a year, versus 13 percent for the average internet population. Del.icio.us allows users to share links to their favorite music, reviews, blogs and more, with some 50 categories to choose from. It was launched in 2003 and purchased by Yahoo two years later.
Tags & Folksonomy: Latest Internet Trend There is a new branch of the Web growing like a well organized storm cloud. This recent trend on the Web can be used to strengthen your presence with major search engines and reach an active audience that is highly interested in your content. Welcome to the world of "folksonomy" and "tagging." What is Folksonomy and Tagging? Folksonomy is a combination of the words folks and taxonomy meaning "people classification management." This allows users some level of control over how the web is organized. One of the most popular tools of the folksonomy concept is tags. Tagging, in the context of this article, is the process of labeling a piece data with metadata.
Using Tagging & Folksonomy to Advertise: Three of the most effective sites currently using tags and/or folksonomy are: Del.icio.us, digg.com, and technorati. Each of these sites is a major player in the folksonomy world. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web application that is growing very fast in popularity. With a free account, del.icio.us users can submit and access all of their bookmarks from any computer with Internet access. By submitting and tagging your own web pages, you instantly give access to thousands of other users with interests in the same tags. Encouraging site visitors to submit your selected webpages to their own del.icio.us bookmark page is a very good way to get more exposure to del.icio.us users. Submitting to del.icio.us is instant and it creates meaningful relevant links important to the major search engines. Digg.com is mostly a technical news site. If you are familiar with the Web phenomenon Slashdot, then digg will remind you of that geek culture. The difference is that ALL of digg's content is created, submitted, and judged by its audience. If your page, blog or online article is good enough to be "dug" by digg users, you could receive literally hundreds of unique visitors immediately. Virtually any participation (comments, submissions, links in your profile) can get your site traffic from digg. The beauty of digg is that it is so popular that many submissions to digg can instantly dominate some keywords on search engines such as google.com.
Technorati.com is a power house in the world of tagging. If you have a blog, Technorati should become one of your favorite search engines on the World Live Web. Many Technorati Tags are beginning to dominate the Web by having constantly updated, fresh blog content on highly focused subjects. The beauty of Technorati is that blog application such as blogware and others are completely integrated with it allowing blog categories to be instantly tagged and syndicated into the blog search engine. Any blog can be manually added as well to technorati's very open tagging system. Like digg, even if you only happen to get a trickle of traffic from technorati itself many times the link value alone will sky rocket the speed in which your site rank in the search engines. There are many other folksonomy sites that can help you with "tag syndication." With its encouragement to get users to submit their own RSS feeds as content, My Yahoo! is a great way to increase traffic and links. Web applications like TagCloud integrates RSS and tagging while wikipedia.org is method of allowing social webpage and content development. All these methods and many more have two great things in common 1) they are free (as of this writing) and 2) they give the power to reshape and categorize the Web to the people. If content is King then content management is the the kingdom.
