Yup, I said “readers”. We’re always talking about podcast subscribers and the feed, but let’s not forget that there has yet to be a credible study that shows over 50% of any given podcast’s listeners even use a podcatcher. Many…

As far as buying into the web 2.0 thing, that really depends on what someone means when they ask that question. Collaboration, information sharing, mashups, promoting others’ content and even your own — yes. Gaming the system to grab center stage with irrelevant content — no.

Of course I mean no disrespect toward your WP tag plugin, Sterling. It looks like you did a nice job there, in fact from what I’ve seen. I’m just talking about tagging and tag use in general from a reader and webmaster perspective. Is this Web 2.0ish thinking? No, but I think it’s pretty clear that I’m not on board the web 2.0 meme. And from what I’ve read from your blog, you don’t seem to be that much either (please correct if I’m wrong). I guess I’m putting ‘tags’ particularly when used to identify what people do at conferences as web 2.0ish. My business card might be 1.0 but it does a fine job of spelling out what I do.

Furthermore, I don’t believe readers would use six, seven or more categories (tags) to describe a single post. Heck in cocomment the average number of tags I put for comments is three. I have no empirical evidence of what others are doing, but that’s an educated guess based on looking through various profiles on del.cio.us. I suppose one could go through the API and get some more exact number on the number of tags used average.

Ultimately, I think the emphasis should be on directing readers helpfully to more specific information through the tags/categories. If it is something only of use to the author, then it is something that should only show up for the author on the page. Not the reader, not the search engines, not the rest of the world.

For example, “Made in Italy” isn’t likely to send readers to posts about chairs made of books and Made In Italy. Instead readers would see items actually made in Italy, which when I followed that Technorati link several of the posts weren’t even in English. I can see a Made In Italy tag being useful for readers from Italy or whom choose that localization, otherwise most readers are going to be reading in English and see this as worthless.

Also there are SEO considerations here. Should the search engine look at the page/post and think it’s about a chair made of books or about all these other promotional links above? Most of what you see above is actually in the post body.

By policing our pages at least somewhat and keeping them related we make it easier for the search engines to properly categorize and return them to people who are looking for the specific information. I don’t typically create pages with the search engines in mind, but I do think about this when adding stuff that is on every post/page.

(Tags used for this comment: ‘tagging’ and ’seo’)

I agree that FeedFlare links should be limited and useful to the user. For instance, even though I use co.mments a lot myself, I don’t include it in my FeedFlare because I think most users would typically want to add a comment before tracking them. I also avoid FeedFlare links that apply to the site as a whole (e.g. Add to Technorati Favorites) — these links should be specific to the post.

However I do use a lot of tags. It isn’t just to seed Technorati — my tags cross-reference topics in my blog. In fact, the tag links in my feed are links to those tags in my blog, not in Technorati. On the site itself I include both, in a relatively small font so it hopefully doesn’t take up too much real estate. I’m not sure how much users use the tags within my site, but I find them useful for finding my own posts. The tag cloud widget also links only to internal posts, and that widget has become pretty popular.