Have you ever implemented tagging on your site?

what is the best way?

[AjiNIMC]

I have a query. Do you treat each word as a tag or a keyphrase. Let me explain.

Say I want to add tags for this forum. I want to say that webmasterworld is about social networks and community building.

how should I tag

1) social networks community building or
2) social networks, community building

I prefer (2) what is your opinion as my site won't be shown for building.

What application do you people use for tagging, I use freetag.

[rogerd]

Although I haven't done it, I'd probably lean toward shorter but still specific tags:

community building, social networks, message boards, discussion forums

and so on...

[AjiNIMC]

I am trying to get a feedback from various communities before starting the program. There are many such examples where one object means more than one thing and tagging does a wonderful job. I still find a limitation. Let me take an example to explain.

I want to tag an auto loan website which offers some information about credit scores. Also it runs a forum, a community, blogs, wiki and few more sections like auto insurance. As a user I am not happy when I am tagging the website with “auto loan, auto insurance, credit score, forums, blogs, wiki, community”. I know that site is more about auto loan than about auto insurance or credit score, wiki is just a small part of it. In long term with few hundreds of tags (lets take 200) we may be able to see a clear difference. May be that

Site A
---------
95% (190 tag count) tagging the site with auto loan
40% (80 tag count) tagging the site with auto insurance
20% (40 tag count) with forums or wiki e.tc

Here I will face another problem that is if I have another site on auto insurance with lesser tag count (say 50).

Site B
---------
95% (47 tag count) for auto insurance

So which site is more recommended for auto insurance according to the tagging system? I need an algo to find out. I suggest a weighted tagging option.

Say an option of tagging with a weight from 1 to 5.

Site A
-------
95% with average 4 weight (190x4 = 760 tag count)
40% with average 1 weight (80x1 = 80 tag count)

Site B
-------
95% with average 4 weight (47x 4 = 188 tag count)

As the tag count grows the number converges to a better estimation. What do you say? Please let me know your suggestion and then I will start my work on it.

Thank you for your time.
AjiNIMC

[jtara]

You've lost me.

Are you wanting to tag content within your own site, for the benefit of your users, or are you wanting to have your site tagged by the big tag-oriented social-networking sites, as a way of developing traffic? (e.g. add those annoying "digg this" etc. buttons...)

Frankly, as a user I haven't found the concept useful, and I avoid both the sites that are built around the concept, and those that have implemented it internally.

It's never found me anything I am looking for. I will stick with traditional search.

[AjiNIMC]

I want to implement this for a review site (as I help them sometimes). They review websites and also tag them with relevant keywords.

Say someone submitted a autowidget.com, then people will tag it with various tags.
User A: auto loans, auto insuarnce e.t.c
User B: auto loans, forums, wiki,..

In this way we can have a tag cloud. See a good example using famous clusty crowd for webmasterworld cloud.clusty.com/search?v%3Aproject=clusty-cloud&cc=1&query=webmasterworld&borderstyle=simple&border-color=123C92&linkstyle=color&color=123C92&width=auto&width-px=500 (admins please allow this url as it is a very non-commercial fun site and not mine :)).

Please let me know if some more explanation is needed.

[jtara]

Got it.

I prefer (2).

But I think users have come to expect (1), I suppose do to del.icio.us being the archetypical implementation.

Which is one of the big problems I have with the concept. Tagging with single words, rather than phrases, doesn't make much sense to me, and doesn't seem to find what I want. But it's what everybody is doing. And, thus, I find the whole concept useless.

The clouds, though, are nice, pretty (at least in some eyes) and meaningless eye-candy.

Maybe if you use phrases, it will be useful. But you will have some user-edumocating to do...

Problem with phrases - word order. You really should normalize, such that "animal hospital" and "hospital animal" are the same. But could make for awkward presentation. That one works out (if you alphabetize), but others wouldn't. I suppose you could keep track of alternative word orders, and use the most common for presentation.

Are there implementations that permit phrases, and also make a presentation with most-common word order within phrases?

[AjiNIMC]

Are there implementations that permit phrases, and also make a presentation with most-common word order within phrases?

I am going to do it. Also if I alone is tagging an object then weight is not required but when many are tagging weight makes sense for me.

Thanks for the reply.

[jtara]

Ahhhh... YOU are doing the tagging... This solves a lot of problems. A consistent point of view will help with a lot of issues.

freetag looks perfectly fine for this, as it can deal with phrases.

BTW, when I looked a del.icio.us just now, I noticed a lot of "cheating" - jamming words together to make a tag word.

[AjiNIMC]

I am using freetag and will develop on it. I need to spend some more time exploring the tag world, folksonomy.