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Tag—you're it! The game of "Tag" has always been popular, and now people who played it as children are reliving their misspent youth on the web by tagging everything in sight. Flickr lets members tag their photos with keywords. Technorati lets bloggers use their entry categories as tags. The "social bookmarking" service del.icio.us uses tags to classify and group shared bookmarks. In each case such "related" tags serve to offer the reader the option to find "more like this", whether it be a photo or an article. iBlog users can get in on the act too...

This article refers to iBlog (version 1.x), a Mac blogging client that was formerly used to publish this site. It may refer to design elements and other features that have since been replaced.

Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio.us weight tags according to how many times they appear in their database: try it out here, here, and here. As Technorati explain "The size of the tag indicates how full of goodies it is." What was I saying about children?

But tags don't have to relate to something vaguely related. They can also be used to link to something very specific, such as an article in Wikipedia.

I decided to add what I call a "Tagophilia bar" to my postings (as in "tags indicating affiliated things—and for the love of it", get it?). I think this is a development to keep an eye on, and something that will no doubt evolve as more and more people and services become "tag aware". This is what the initial version of the Tagophilia bar looks like:

From left to right, the icons serve the following functions:

• Find out more about this subject on Wikipedia
• See posts using this tag on Technorati
• See photos using this tag on Flickr
• See bookmarks using this tag on del.icio.us
• Is this entry bookmarked on del.ico.us?

The basic code for this follows, building on Greg's original description about iBlog and Technorati tags. You'll need to delete the space before the anchor and image tags, fix the image source URLs to point to a graphic on your site, and assign a meaningful title to show up when a user hovers over the icon. I suggest posting it below your entry in EntryPage.txt:

Tagophilia: More on<br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[$EntryCategory$]" rel="tag"> <img src="wikipedia.gif" alt="" title="Wikipedia" /> </a>
 <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[$EntryCategory$]" rel="tag"><img src="technorati.gif" alt="" title="Technorati" /> </a>
 <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/[$EntryCategory$]" rel="tag"><img src="flickr.gif" alt="" title="Flickr" /> </a>
 <a href="http://del.icio.us/tag/[$EntryCategory$];" rel="tag"><img src="delicious.gif" alt="" title="del.icio.us" /> </a>
 | Bookmarked?
 <a href="javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/url?v=1&amp;url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)"><img src="delicious.gif" alt="" title="del.icio.us?" /> </a>

You can of course style this to suit your taste. Do leave a comment if you find this useful, and please let me know if you find any other great ways of integrating tags.

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