Friday, June 09, 2006

NECC06: Blogging and Tagging

David Warlick has started to blog about NECC06 and suggested we tag our posts with necc06. Great idea! Also, we now know there will be full wireless connectivity at the conference.

To be honest, the intricacies of RSS are still not completely clear to me but I am trying to keep up. The practice of tagging a blog post allows blogs all around the world to interconnect and ideas to interact and bounce around. It allows users to find like-minded posts on relevant topics such as necc06. I have not bothered too much about tagging my posts until now, however I am a presentter at NECC06, I will be blogging NECC06, I want to know who else is blogging NECC06 and what they are saying. Therefore, how do I tag my posts?

I have taken advice from Technorati and their help page on Using Technorati Tags. Being a blogger.com user I think I come under the category of "If your blog software doesn't support categories or you're not sure". Therefore I am editing each post with the suggested HTML tag.
I have also investigated Ping Configurations on the Technorati site and for blogger.com this has told me to make sure I have allowed my blog to be public so that automatic pings can be fed back to Technorati each time the blog is updated. Otherwise, I could manually update my ping as a Technorati subscriber. I am concerned about making the blog 'public' as such as this seemed to attract spam comments. I have advised my students not to make their blogger.com blogs public for that reason.

I would welcome any further advice available on this matter re tagging and pinging.


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1 comment:

David said...

Hello there

I picked up this post because of your necc06 tag - so that bit is working. :-)

I still have occasional tussles with Technorati, but in general, it all happens automatically as long as I remember to add the technorati tags at the end of my post. I now have a javascript that sits in a shotcut button on my browser's toolbar to help with tag generation - I type in the tag words and it generates the html for me to paste into my Blogger entry. I can't for the life of me remember where I got it, but a search for Technorati tag generator and java should throw up something. :-) If you draw a blank, get back to me and I can send the javascript and some clearer instructions!

As for spam comments: I only had two. After receiving the second one, I turned on the "Word Verification" thing and I've never had a problem since.

Hope this helps.