Social Tagging and Fractals of Change

Bloggers like to be read; why else would they blog?  Social tagging services drive traffic to blogs as I posted recently.  So, I have made it easier to tag my posts on the most popular services.

No matter whether you read Fractals of Change in a feed reader, via email subscription, or directly at blog.tomevslin.com, you’ll see a line near the bottom of each post which looks like this:

Tag with: del.icio.us | digg | reddit | YahooMyWeb | Furl | TailRank | NewsVine

If you are registered with one of these services, clicking on its name gives you a simple way to tag a post.  And, if you’re registered with one of these sites you already know what value it gives you so you may want to skip the descriptions below.

In case you are not registered with a social tagging service, there are at least three reasons why you might want to register with one (all of these listed are free).

1. to tag pages descriptively so you can find them later;
2. to find those posts in the vast blogosphere which are likely to be interesting to you;
3. to help guide others to interesting posts (note that this is an “unselfish” reason).

I’ve blogged about del.icio.us before.  You use it to assign tags to web pages which make them easy for you to find later.  Because the tags are public by default, the aggregation of tags allows you to find articles which others have tagged with tags which interest you.  You can also track the tagging of people whose opinions you respect.  You can also subscribe to RSS feeds of articles with certain tags.  Registration requires an email address.

(Full disclosure: I was once an indirect investor in del.icio.us and I’m a regular user so I know it better than the other services I’m about to describe.  All of these services but particularly del.icio.us, digg, and reddit drive traffic to my blog.)

Digg is very influential.  It supports voting on web pages and promotes them to prominence based on the number of votes they receive and how recently these votes (“diggs” in their terminology) were recorded.  It does not support tagging but does allow diggers to assign a post to one of sixteen categories.  There is an indepth post about digg and the various roles members play in making it successful on Alex Bosworth’s blog. Digg registration requires an email address.

Reddit allows voting either up or down.  The prominence of an article depends on net votes and age.  Reddit uses your up and down votes to in order to determine what posts you may be interested in and makes a recommended list available based on your deduced preferences – trouble is they don’t reveal how they deduce or match your preferences.  I don’t have enough experience to say whether they do it well but there is a good post and comment stream on the Reddit Recommendation Engine at Dharmesh.com.  Reddit requires registration but does not require an email address.  Theoretically, not requiring an email address makes it easier for those seeking publicity to set up sock puppet accounts and vote for themselves.

YahooMyWeb’s tagging service seems to do pretty much what del.icio.us does.  And Yahoo now owns del.icio.us.  So I’m not sure there will be two separate tagging services here for long.  Can’t ignore Yahoo though.  Registration with an email address (or prior Yahoo registration) required.

Furl does about what del.icio.us does; its adherents say it does more. It does allow for rating as well as tagging of articles for example; I find its UI somewhat easier to use.  On the other hand, del.icio.us has more users so more tagging.  Furl requires an email address for registration.

TailRank works somewhat like tech.meme (formerly tech.memeorandum) and uses links from other blogs to decide what’s hot and what’s not.  However, TailRank also factors in user submissions, allows tagging, and counts the number of users who tag an article as a contributor to its rank.  It calls itself a memetracker.  The service will filter hot articles for you from the blogs you tell it you read and will recommend new blogs based on what you already like.  Registration requires an email address.

Newsvine tracks articles from newswires and articles pointed to or submitted by users.  It does support tagging.  Registration requires an email address.

I’m curious, of course, to see whether you actually click on these links. So I installed MyBlogLog.  Had to do that anyway because Brad and Fred have.  If you mouse over a link on my blog (but not in RSS feeds or email) you’ll see how many clicks there have been on it today (not counting the ones that come from RSS or email versions of the blog which is most of my circulation).