Understanding "tag and ping"

My last posting talked about blog and ping. At the end of this week, many mailing lists and blogs are going to talk about a “revolutionary” adaption of blog and ping called “tag and ping“. As always, it's good to take pronouncements like “the next generation of tag and ping” with a grain of salt.

Tag and ping is nothing more than blog and ping with tagged posts. Tagging, of course, is one of the more recent (but not that recent anymore) “Web 2.0″ crazes. The idea is simple: content (typically blog postings) are categorized using “tags”. A tag is a link that follows a recognized format. For example, Technorati's tagging system encourages you to add links like this to your postings:

<a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/AdSense” rel=”tag”>AdSense</a>

When Technorati reads you blog, it looks for these tags and automatically adds the posting containing the tag into the given category. This is an example of self-categorization, because the creator of the content does the tagging. (Many blogging systems support tagging implicitly via their own categories, by the way.) Other services like del.icio.us allow for third-party categorization of content.

The good thing about tagging is that it lets you easily find content related to a general topic area. (Kind of like what AdSense does — wouldn't it be neat if Google harnessed the power of its AdSense patent and created an automatic tagging system for content? You know, I can see this showing up in the search engine results for pages, like an automated Google Co-op system. But I digress.) Tagging is not perfect by any means, though. You still have the problem of deciding which tags to use. And you have to decide if you trust the tagger to tag legitimate, on-topic content.

Serious bloggers are already tagging. There's nothing new about tagging. I'm sure people who've done the blog and ping thing before have also done some tagging. But apparently someone saw a hole in the blog and ping system and decided to exploit it, hence the new product.

If you're really interested in the Tag and Ping product, which is apparently going to retail for $147, here's the secret affiliate signup page for it. (Well, it's not so secret if you understand how 1ShoppingCart works and you do a little sleuthing with someone else's affiliate ID…) Buy it yourself using your own affiliate link (be sure to clear your cookies!) and get it for half-off, although you'll have to sell at least one copy of it to someone else in order to see any money because of the minimum $100 payout level…

Or you could just start using tags in your postings if you aren't already doing so! And you can bet that if enough people start “tagging and pinging” that Techorati, del.icio.us and other will be taking steps to weed out the cruft.

P.S.: People who join their affiliate program get access to a free report called How to Quickly and Easily Protect Your AdSense Account From Accidental Clicks, which you may have seen floating around in various mailing lists (I got three separate copies of it sent to me today already). The advice in the report is pretty basic: either turn off JavaScript or else edit your hosts file to stop ads from showing when viewed from your own browser. If you don't know how to do either, the report lists the steps to do them. The end of the report is a big ad for Tag and Ping, of course. You can just download the report from the link above (I can redistribute it as an affiliate, of course) and read it without having to join their program, but it's not exactly earth-shattering… It was odd to receive this report so shortly after yesterday's post on how AdSense publishers can keep their noses clean.

Sponsored Link: Since we're talking about mailing lists, join ListDotCom to give Internet marketers permission to plug their latest money-making systems at you.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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