Global Moxie

The big news in today’s Big Medium 2 beta update is the new tag feature. Tagging is a buzzword in web development these days, and it’s the mother’s milk of the social websites that are collectively known by the “Web 2.0” moniker. But that doesn’t mean that they’re only for the YouTubes of the world. Tags are relevant and valuable to your site, too.

What are tags?

Photo by turtblu.

Tags are keywords with a twist: a deceptively simple feature with a big impact.

Keywords have been with the web since the get-go, of course, originally intended to help search engines index pages. In the last couple of years, keywords resurfaced as tags, this time as browsable navigation elements that help you find pages with similar content. Click a tag, see all the pages that share that tag.

Web 2.0 sites like Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us and Last.fm use tags as primary organizational elements. Contributors tag their content with appropriate keywords, and then visitors can drill down by keyword to find similar content from across the entire collection of photos, videos, bookmarks, music, whatever. In these sites, tags impose an informal order on a chaos of contributed content.

Tags make Web 2.0 tick. Tags are hot.

But wait a sec... Big Medium isn’t really for social websites. Big Medium is a collaborative tool, sure, but it’s not intended to be used for massive aggregation of community-contributed content. This means that Big Medium sites don’t have the same organizational challenge as tag-happy sites. Your editorial team defines a nice orderly category structure, and you file your pages appropriately.

So where’s the value? Why would a magazine site, corporate site, community newspaper or family blog need tags? For sites that already have a strong set of navigation categories and organizational structure, why bother?

Let’s start with the really, really big picture: the web ecosystem.

Sites are social, too

Photo by Iguana Jo.

Sharing is the core activity of the social web, and I’m not talking only about individuals sharing videos or photos. Sites share, too.

One of the extremely cool aspects of the web’s recent evolution is the degree to which individual sites contribute to the web’s cloud of available content. Every page you publish is a piece of community-contributed content, a new thread in the web of data. You’re sharing, even if only passively.

Sites and services are emerging to gather content from all over the web to present your pages in custom formats and collections. Like it or not (and really, you should like it), there are more and more opportunities for your individual pieces of content to find a life and value outside of your site.

A mix-and-mash culture is gradually entering the mainstream. Until recently, most of us experienced this only through Google’s search box. Type a few words, get a list of related pages from all around the web. When links to your site appear, the content you contributed to the web is mixed with a bunch of other pages into a list of Google search results.

The concept is getting more refined. Sites like Technorati and IceRocket, for example, let you browse the latest blog posts by tag keyword. Interested in the upcoming Hack Day in London? Subscribe to the Technorati hackdaylondon tag, and you’ll see the latest blogs, photos and videos tagged with “hackdaylondon” from across the web.

The glue between sites

Tags, in other words, are a way that external sites can identify what your individual content is about, and help folks browse it alongside related content from other sites. Tags make up a highly informal but web-wide system of navigation. They are the glue of the social web.

Behind the scenes, Big Medium formats your news feeds and web pages to give search engines and external services clues to your page tags. The software adds category tags to your RSS feeds. It uses the rel-tag microformat to mark your tag links. By giving you more opportunities to describe your content and by formatting that content according to emerging data standards, Big Medium makes your site a good citizen of the social web.

It’s not all about altruism, though. Sure, tagging makes it easier for external services to consume your content, but that in turn makes your message easier to find. It brings you more readers and, if that’s your bag, more customers.

But enough about the ecosystem. Tags also give you real and immediate value within the confines of your own site.

Another dimension of site navigation

Tags offer an additional (and more informal) way to categorize your site’s content in a way that complements your site’s traditional section-based organization.

The categories defined by your site’s navigation menus are the big-picture chapter headings that provide the same function as a book’s table of contents. Tags, meanwhile, are more like a book’s index, providing visitors a way to look up pages that are related to specific terms.

For example, if your site is an online magazine about architecture and design, your sections might consist of broad categories like “interviews,” “reviews,” “news,” and “about us.” These sections make up the site’s main navigation. Your tags would then address other categories that are too fine-grained to appear in your main section navigation. For example: architect names (“Frank Gehry,” “Rem Koolhaas,”), architectural styles (“Modernism,” “Brutalism,”), creative process (“inspiration” “creativity”), or geography (“Europe”, “Asia”, “USA”).

Because tags often cross section categories, they give your visitors an additional dimension of site navigation. In our architecture example, the tag “Frank Gehry” might be applied to interviews with Gehry, reviews of his buildings, and news of his upcoming designs. Clicking on the “Frank Gehry” tag would take you to a round-up of all of these pages, giving your visitors a 360-degree view of your site’s content on the subject, from all sections of the site.

A tag cloud for “The Sopranos.”

You can see tags in large-scale action at the New York Times site. The Times uses tags (“Times Topics”) to display links related to its gigantic index of topics, from Aaliyah to Zyuganov. Pretty much every article includes a sprinkling of these tag links throughout the text.

In Big Medium, a site’s main tag page lists all of the tags in use on the site. The tags are listed alphabetically, but displayed as a “tag cloud” with the most common tags displayed in larger type. Over time, this becomes a useful way to see what your site is about at a glance. The big topics announce themselves.

Special sections in disguise

Tags, in other words, define all of the highly specific aspects of the content that you create. They define micro-categories on your site. They’re special sections in disguise.

Among other things, this is an ideal way to handle time-specific content. Say that your company holds an annual conference. Tagging related news with a “conference2007” tag makes it easy to round-up all of the relevant info. Likewise, a community newspaper covering local school-board elections might tag all related articles with “schoolvotes2007.”

No need to carve out a new, formal section of the site. Tags have you covered.

In fact, it’s that informality that makes tags so appealing as an organizational structure. They adapt organically as you add more content to the site. They give your editorial team flexibility that complements the more rigid taxonomy of your site sections.

Hey, everybody else is doing it, now it’s your turn. Tag, you’re it.

Tags: bigmedium, cms, microformats, socialmedia, tags