OK, I’ll admit it: I haven’t fully embraced tagging yet. Yeah, yeah, I know I lose a few geek points for this revelation, but it’s true. For me, it just seems like more work after I’ve already created content to go out and start categorizing that content using “tags.” What I need to be able to do is categorize at the time I write it and then it’s forever done and compatible with the major tagging tools.

However, if you are interested in standalone tagging / RSS aggregation tools, then there are a couple options out there like Feedmarker (shown above) and Feedtagger (shown below).

Both these tools allow import from an OPML file, although I had some trouble getting Feedtagger to work with the OPML generated by Bloglines, Feedmarker gulped it just fine. Both products were on the slow side as far as navigation (hosting issue?). Making tags in Feedmarker is a snap, you just right click on the item and add your source.

These tools do not seem to have been designed for users who follow and regularly read a large number of feeds. For example, Feedtagger’s show feeds feature only goes up to 100 and there doesn’t seem to be any pagination after that (maybe I just didn’t see it), but there is a search feature. Feedmarker has pagination, but no quick search. Both tools seemed like they could be useful for somebody with 10-20 RSS feeds that they were tagging.

Maybe I went about this all wrong and should have only used it for tagging our own blog entries and not trying to add the current RSS reading list I’m using.

Probably the easiest tagging utility I’ve found so far is just to add Technorati tags to your blog posts at the time of writing. Technorati provides a quick and painless bookmarklet that sits in your toolbar, so after you write your post, just click on that and follow the JavaScript prompt and copy/paste into the body of your blog post. This skips the need for using any standalone tools. I tagged posts for the Northern Voice conference using Technorati.

Note, that if your posts always fit a certain category you can make this process seamless by adding some code to your category RSS/Atom feeds. Technorati explains <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html”>how</a>:

<category>[tagname]</category>
<dc :subject>[tagname]</dc>

Though the tagging sensation, if you aren’t a geek that is, is still very much in its infancy, it does have potential to help make things more relevant if the spammers don’t ruin it and people actually use it. This post is tagged below to “Tags” via Technorati as an example.

Technorati Tags: Tags

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