Simple Subject Sunday: Links and Tags

Doesn't each writer hope that people find their blog interesting and helpful? I believe the answer is yes. Besides writing an interesting article, it helps to make the blog posting accessible through the reader's use of search engines and access to related articles as they read your blog posting.

One way to do that is through the use of links. Links related to other posts pointing the reader to the topic of interest. Since time is of the essence, links need to be accurate.

The link in a posting should take the reader to the exact posting the blogger wants them to access. When reading your posts, a reader should not have to wander through the desert to find your blog posts related to the search topic, because they will often give up....due to lack of time to focus on this effort.

I also discovered, through my own research, that blogs need to have layers of organization for ease of access. Links and appropriate tag clouds can represent a necessary equivalent of an online bibliography.

WORDLE: A Practical Application

WORDLE has a function that allows users to submit any del.icio.us user name to make a non-linguistic representation of bookmark tags. You can analyze the use of various tags within your bookmarks and look for areas of great emphasis, synonymous tags or areas of little emphasis. Each of these areas of analysis can drive future teaching and writing related to your professional development plan and the school's curriculum map.

I created my delicious WORDLE that could be used formative assessment, summative assessment or self-assessment by analyzing this snapshot from November 10, 2007 of n2teaching delicious bookmarks

Here is another version of the same set of bookmarks on the same day that contains more words. Controlling the number of total words is an aspect of WORDLE that you can change within the layout function. Hopefully, these ideas will lead you to think of more ways to use WORDLE as an interactive tool, not just a toy.

My Plurkadian Tag Cloud: Part 2

This screenshot is part 2 of my Plurkadian tag cloud. I am really still looking for an rss feed. Another aspect of this second part of my tag cloud, is that I noticed that some words are topics that I am against, not just what I am for...this is my story.

My Plurkadian Tag Cloud

Plurk is a microblogging social network that my PLN, Professional Learning Network, uses to collaborate in real time and asynchronously.

A wonderful new feature, is the Plurkadian Tag Cloud. These are very interesting.

I can't wait until there is an rss feed for these Plurkadian analytics.

Permalinks: Improve the Validity of Your Blog

Have you ever searched for a particular topic, found what seemed like a great resource, only to discover that the link is dead?

Finding dead links is a frustrating experience. There are ways to avoid that happening to your own blog postings. One way is to use the PERMALINK. A permanent link to your blog posting is made through the use of a tiny bit of code that can even a New Bee can cut and paste into their blog postings.

Permalinks stand as one of the more elusive bits of proper standardization in archiving that I will continue to develop. I believe Permalinks are as important as tags, and everyone who reads my work knows the extreme importance I place on tags and the display of tag clouds.

As per my usual course of learning a new skill, I always begin with the Help function of whatever software or web application I am using. Always remember, "Help is my Friend!" One of the first references made to permalinks was the blog post, On Permalinks and Paradigms, and I would recommend it to anyone learning to use Permalinks.

If you have had experiences with permalinks, would you share those experiences with us here in the comments?

A Blog, Without Tag Clouds?

The blog LearnMore: Library Stream by Steve Campion is a wonderful introduction to tags and clouds, and I will pass this URL on to those I think need it. I have noticed that teched people are often very informed about computers, yet sometimes lack insight into cataloging and datamining. Both of these are skills I continue to hone. I enjoy the activity of deconstruction of text to summarizing tag clouds.

One specific problem area that I am noticing as I read other people's blogs, is what seems to be a total indifference to the necessity of tags. Another major problem is their lack of tags using words found in the posting. For example, a blogger had asked us, the forum participants, to provide some teched resource information, but the words used in the posting were not those used in the tags. Because the tags were incomplete and inaccurate, they were ineffective. This caused confusion among the readers.

Recently, I noticed a forum posting that referred me to a teched blog, but the blogger had not given the correct URL for the posting referenced. After an hour of sorting through the blog titles, I finally found the posting. I don't ordinarily stick with an issue such as this, but there was a desire to share this major issue (lack of tags or even proper titles) with others. Other bloggers can learn from this experience. It is an opportunity.

Being more like a chaotic stream of consciousness, blogs do not have the organizing structure that is inherent in websites and wikis. I believe it is the responsibility of bloggers to organize their chaos through tagging and clouds.

The tag cloud is very visual, yet it is text. I believe this understanding enables a wide variety of learners to access the blog posting they want to read. Isn't that what bloggers want? Visitors...Readers....Clickers;D

Steve Campion posted a wonderful blog about a critical issue in the interactive web. Tagging is a very important skill, and I believe those who can search effectively may also tag effectively.

Maybe It's Your Tags and Links! or lack thereof

A colleague on Classroom 2.0 mentioned that he was not getting any feedback, on his blog, when he started a conversation about international educational technology groups. Since many teachers have provided information about these groups, I thought I will help him add to his list.

Doesn't each writer hope that people find their blog interesting and helpful? I thought the answer was yes, so I was curious to discover why he wasn't receiving feedback on this blog posting. I began to investigate the situation so that I could learn from it. Learning from others is a common goal among teachers involved in professional development. Find an interesting question and learn about it.

What started out as a short bypass to help out a colleague, turned into another, excellent learning opportunity for me. I discovered that links need to be accurate, the link in a posting should take you to the exact posting the blogger wants you the reader to access. I also discovered that blogs need to have layers of organization for ease of access, and tag clouds can represent a necessary equivalent of an online bibliography.

At first glance, I looked at my colleague's CR2.0 discussion tags, and I selected a "lack of significant tags" thesis that may be keeping people from his blog post. I know that many of our international edtech friends watch our blogs, just as we watch theirs. I thought maybe his intended audience, international education technology advocates, didn't scope out any relevant tags. To figure out if this might be the case, I looked at the tags he used in his CR2.0 discussion.

The CR2.0 tags for his discussion, Non-US Ed Tech Organizations, were: ed, organizations, tim, blogging, tech, intended, consequences, holt. I believe that the tags: organizations, tech, and ed, were helpful and quite appropriate. The other tags seemed fine for people looking for my colleague's blogs, but didn't relate to the topic at hand, international organizations for educational technology. Therefore, I noted that adding the tags, international, educational, technology, provided in his CR2.0 discussion title might allow improved access to the relevant blog posting, therefore helping him get more comments relevant to his request for names of organizations.

Next, I went to my CR2.0 colleagues' blog link to find the posting he was referencing, so I could reference the tags he used there. The blog link provided did not take me to the relevant blog posting. The link given took me to the front page of his website/blog, so I had to click on it to get to his blog postings. That was alright because I felt confident that I would find the relevant blog posting soon.

After I clicked into his blog postings, I began to look through his current postings and the archives for a title that related to International Educational Technology Organizations. There were two postings that "kinda sorta" looked like a title that related to his CR2.0 discussion topic. I clicked on one of them and read it. This blog posting was not about international educational technology organizations, per se.

Since I always keep a time record for my professional development journal, I looked up to discover that I already spent an hour trying to find the relevant blog posting, so I stopped there. While I was happy to spend this time to help a colleague, it appears that I was not successful. I did not find his original blog, so I could not add to his database he was hoping to build.

While the intended consequence of my initial adventure did not occur, the unintended consequence was more valuable. I received an extremely important aha moment and discovered that some key organizational tools, such as tag clouds or titles with ALL relevant key tags, can make or break the viability of our blog posts. This is knowledge that any of us might use to enhance our own blogs.

Belatedly, I discovered that while my "lack of tags" thesis may be partially correct, the larger concern was appropriate access to the content of his blog. I found a table of contents in the archives, and so I had to click on Archives to access the list of postings. None of the blog postings that I could see mentioned the key words: international educational technology organizations. I looked around for some other way to easily refine my search, for instance a tag cloud for his blog postings. I didn't find one.

It seems that my colleagues' blog is set up to increase click statistics, but accessibility is a more critical concern because it brings people back to your blog. Quick access has special relevance for those bloggers who direct you to read a particular blog posting.

Why do we use links in our postings? I think we use links to improve ease of access to relevant data and keep the reader interested in the topic we are discussing.

In the end, my colleague gave me the opportunity to increase his Technorati rating and include an excellent topic for my own blog posting. BTW, I discovered that the missing tag was world. I did finally find the appropriate blog posting on developing a database for international educational technology organizations....I think;D

What started as a journey to provide a list of international educational technology organizations became a constructivist search for relevance. As a result, I learned some valuable lessons that I will use.