How Not To Blog ?

Folksonomic tags, I think, would be very useful augmenting (or in lieu of) blog topics. The image below is an illustration of such usage, using a few articles from this blog. It is simply a chain of tags that alows the reader to quickly determine the scope of the article where, previously, the title only provided, well, a title.

A title focuses on exactly what the piece is about. It rarely mentions all of the peripheral context of the piece and oftentimes doesn't tell you about other important parts of the article. And besides that, many titles are vague and off the mark. Even some of this blog's titles are just plain silly. How many readers am I missing out on because I thought of some stupid title? (Or just didn't use a tagchain for my title, garnering the appropriate amount of community interest for my post?)

Tags work best for long articles but would also work well for shorter ones. Shorter articles would requirer fewer tags, but it might prove that skimming a couple of tags is much quicker than skimming that short article to determine if there are any points of interest. This becomes more important when so many of us are becoming overwhelmed by trying to scan blogs and other sources of information for articles of interest. The number of interesting and relevant blogs will only increase in the future.

Your blog program would, of course, require a module to effectively use such a system. It may work like this:

Type your post as your normally would. When you submit your article, your program scans the article and determines which words (repeat words, words in a database, user-defined words, whatever) will be tags for the article. There is also room to add your own tags, but this process automates it for you. You then select which tags you want to use as tags by selecting the weight of the tag, on a scale from 1 to 10. Tags not given a weight will not be used.

You decide what each weight and tag should be - it's the folksonomic tag chain.

In the article, the tags are displayed alphabetically and according to the weight you have given to it (changes font size and perhaps color). Clicking on a tag in the chain will take you to a page that displays the appropriate tagged articles from your site and other sites (delicious, Technorati, etc.)

This method can also assist RSS aggregators in filtering articles for you. You could set your reader to display articles from X blog tagged with Yahoo with a weight of at least 6, for example. Or perhaps Technorati (or Yahoo, Google) could search for: "social networking"+4, Friendster+8, CEO+2. It's a bit like using +friendster as part of your search query, except that you can make certain words more important than others.

Another extension of this system (perhaps in the year 2020) would be to RSS-feed tagchains from other sites to your blog, making the tagchains truly folksonomic, and community-chosen. You might think, for example, that your article is about your trip to Peru but others have determined that the most amazing part of your article/post is the recipe for quinoa you posted (heck, that might not even be one of your tags).