Microformats are pre-agreed, human friendly ways of formatting web posts so that machines can process them. Microformats exist for calendar entries, reviews, tagging web posts, and tagging links in link blogs. In brief, microformats are like templates in Microsoft Word but aimed at the open format world-wide web.
It turns out that some arcane features of microformats can be quite determinant in creating search engine visibility. In particular, the reltag format (for tagging blog posts) requires that tags (labels you apply to posts so that people will know how you categorize them) point at a URL that acts as a repository or definition page for the tag. This requirement means that tag repositories are likely to receive a lot of links giving them high search visibility and effectively making tag pages aggregators for vertical search on specific topics.
As I mentioned last week, technorati seems to be one of the first organizations to actively build a business model around this phenomenon. A question raised in subsequent emails is how can an individual site or family of sites use tagging and microformats to get themselves on the map like technorati. In this post, I'd like to propose a light weight mechanism for doing just that.
Light weight do-it-yourself vertical search aggregation
The difference between individual site operators and technorati is that individual site operators have an interest in popularizing a topic and being identified with it while technorati attempts to more neutrally determine ever-changing topics of interest. A mechanism to help individual site operators popularize their topics in this changing topic soup will use some of the same tools as technorati but typically in a different way. Here's my cut at the key elements individual site operators need to consider:
- Site operators need a fun and easy way to tag their blog posts that goes beyond the standard category interface (see Steve Mallett's comment here). The idea is that site operators will tag according to predetermined categories but also have the flexibility to add tags (categories) as they perceive the overall conversation in their area evolving. In my case, the latest version of Movable Type (3.17) and the new tagging plug-in appear to accomplish this.
- Site operators need their own social bookmarking system to collect both their posts and web articles they and their associates find of interest. The key here is that site operators have editorial control over the place where the tags are pointing (something that is possible with both the reltag and xFolk microformats). By encouraging people to point at their repositories when tagging, site owners will get search engine credit and become known as sources for the topics covered by those tags. Others are most likely to point at site-owners when site owners are already producing and aggregating high quality content (for anecdotal evidence, see this link count query for Scoble's link blog). Currently, scuttle and de.lirio.us provide social bookmarking systems that can be installed for free by site owners to enable this capability.
- Third, site owners should publish their tagged blog entries and bookmark repository with a folksonomy-orientd microformat like xFolk. The tags should point at the site-owner's tag repository, not some third party's. xFolk is optimized for publishing and sharing bookmarks in repositories, and because it incorporates reltag, it also works for blog entries. Using a microformat will eventually also allow your repository and blog links to be easily picked up by tag search engines that are starting to emerge.
- Next, it would really help, if the site blog tool incorporated some way to automatically update the bookmarks repository with new posts as the site collaborators write and tag them. Again, del.icio.us (a popular social bookmark repository) and scuttle appear to share the same web API that enables posting from external client programs. So, it would seem possible to write a plug-in solution for weblogging software that would automatically post weblog entries to social bookmarking repositories that shared this api.
- Finally, site owners need a convenient way to keep track of which tags they are using, particularly since they will be using them both for blogging and bookmarking other links. Cori Schlegel provides a remarkably simple method for achieving this using del.icio.us. Since scuttle uses the del.icio.us web API, the same should be possible in scuttle.
By becoming vertical search aggregator, site owners will become known for certain topics. This advice is very frequent for blogging. However, just blogging is not enough. Site owners' content needs to be incorporated in a larger editorial context to attract attention. Vertical search aggregation is one means of achieving this end.
Bud,
I just found a blog post describing that you can add tags to your Wordpress blog...so you can have both categories and tags (and show your tags in a tag cloud)
Here's my post:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/06/21/wordpress-plugin-subject-terms-tags/