Is it Worth It? Tagging & Social Bookmarking?

I'm still on the fence on this one, but may give it a shot...just so I'm not talking out my rear end (since I haven't tried it). Still, in my few years online, I've come to value my instinct and experience when it comes to assessing new online opportunities.

I'm talking about tagging on your blogs. You know those keyword links you see on blogs to Technorati or wherever. Here's an example from my techy friend Lynette Chandler's blog:



Personally, I think these links are a distraction...particularly to your non-tech savvy readers. For Lynette's market, it may be appropriate, but if you don't reach blogging geeks, you'll likely send your readers clicking through to all these places and they won't really know why.

I note that my friend Lynn Terry says we should stop the fear about linking out when it comes to blogs. I agree, but I believe in linking with a true purpose that is useful to your visitor.

Plus, a tag is just a temporary measure to get some traffic from a blog search site. From what I can see, if you keep these links on your site for a long time, they'll be helping Technorati (or whomever you're linking to) and not likely doing you much good - especially for popular topics.

From reports of other people using the tags, the extra short-term traffic doesn't seem to be worth cluttering up my blog for. And besides, it's tough to measure if the extra traffic came from the tag or just because you pinged the web logs...and pinging doesn't create any reader distractions.

A word of caution, though...and again, this is purely my speculation...is that I expect that this method will lose it's effectiveness. People are gearing up to teach people about tagging and you can expect plenty of hyped up products. And just like any traffic generation method that gets pumped up, it will be abused by people who don't believe in adding value to the blogosphere, but prefer to produce garbage for a quick buck. And when it's abused, the people who created the technology have to make changes and the original method will no longer be so effective.

But back to the topic...

Through a discussion on the private Reese Report forum, Charles, posted a little video about using tagging, if you're not familiar with it. I asked Charles if he was going to perhaps show a more meaningful example because I believe the same results could have been achieved without tagging Technorati. A simple, automated ping would have been sufficient with his fictional topic. I'll let you know what he says. He does also have a free newsletter that I've taken him up on (the link as the bottom of the video page)...and we'll see what other information he can provide us with.

Along the same lines of tagging, my friend Lynette also has an interesting article on social bookmarking. Near the end of the article, you'll see that Lynette has requested some help for an experiment. I'm willing to help her on this experiment, but I'm waiting for more results before I move ahead on my own.

I'm also interested in learning more and hearing your experiences...so share them please. :-)

Edited to Add:
I thought I should post this from the Technorati site:
















So you don't really have to link to Technorati, but that still doesn't seem to eliminate the excessive links on a blog. Or if you're blog supports categories, then you can use your categories as your tags. But how many categories does a focused blog really need?

*Source: http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html