Tag, your It!

Technorati is an aggregator: they collect blogs and posts and links, and organize them for re-presentation (as in here they are again, not as in what your lawyer does). It does this primarily based on the tag.

Tags are one part of what makes the Internet possible. A tag is the basic unit of a mark-up language, a tool for communicating information about a text above and beyond what is in the test. If you're familiar with proof reading marks, such as the little loop that means "delete this" or the carat (flattented V) that means "insert this here", you basically know what a tag is. These marks are a form of tag.

For those of you who've been around computers long enough to remember pre-Windows versions of WordPerfect, or its even older precusors such as WordStart, you may remember the Show Codes command, which enabled you to see the little secret codes that made this bit italic, that bit centered on the page. Those codes were tags.

We recognize the tags used in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) created for the Internet by its use of the angle bracket. These are the carats (flattened Vees) that point sideways.

For example, these codes would make this italic . Notice that the special information is inside the carats, in this case a letter I that tells a web browser, make this Italic. At the end of the bit to be formatted is a closing tag, which has a slash in it. This means "we're done making stuff italic. Now cut it out."

If you want to learn about tags, we'll visit that another day. The internet has evolved a complex set of tags and super tagging systems, which we won't bother with here. We'll just remember that tragging information is enclosed in angle brackets, and that there are opening a closing tags (the latter with a slash). We'll remember this so we can fix our blog post when we hose it up messing with our Technorati tags, so we an fix it.

Ok, end of Lesson 1. Lesson 2, the URL or link tag, and how these work with Technorati.

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