Using Technorati Tags

Using Technorati Tags

What's a tag?

Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense.

Where does the stuff on Technorati Tag pages come from?

The photos come from Flickr, a great photo sharing community. If you'd like your photos to appear on our tag pages, join Flickr and post your photos there. And remember to tag 'em! Technorati includes public photographs tagged by Flickr members.

The links come from web-based bookmark services Delicious and Furl. If you would like to contribute links to Technorati Tag pages, you can join Delicious or join Furl and post some links.

The rest of the Technorati Tag pages is made up of blog posts. And those come from you! Anyone with a blog can contribute to Technorati Tag pages. There are two ways to contribute:

• If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom (like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, Radio), just use the included category system and make sure you are publishing autodiscovered RSS/Atom and we will automatically include tags with your posts! Your categories will be read as tags. For example:

  • <category>[tagname]</category>
  • <dc:subject>[tagname]</dc:subject>

  The [tagname] can be anything, but it should be descriptive. Please only use tags that are relevant to the post. You do not need to include the brackets, just the descriptive keyword for your post.

• If your blog software doesn't support categories or you're not sure, you can still participate. To associate a post with a Technorati Tag all you have to do is "tag" your post by including a link with a defined tag relationship. For example:

  <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>

  The [tagname] can be anything, but it should be descriptive. Please only use tags that are relevant to the post. You do not need to include the brackets, just the descriptive keyword for your post. Just make sure to include rel="tag".

  You do not have to link to Technorati. You can link to any URL that ends in something conforming to the tag standard. For example, these tag links would also be included on our Tag pages:

  • <a href="http://apple.com/ipod" rel="tag">iPod</a>
  • <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity" rel="tag">Gravity</a>
  • <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua" rel="tag">Chihuahua</a>

Once you have posted the tagged post, there are two ways to have your post included on a Technorati Tag page:

• If your blog software is configured to ping Technorati, congratulations! You're done!
• If your blog software does not support automatic pinging, or you haven't set it up yet, or you're not sure, you can manually ping us here. You might also want to configure your blog software to ping us automatically so you don't have to do that every time.

Your post should appear on the page in a few minutes (up to an hour during periods of intense activity). Thank you for helping to build the real-time web.

Want to help build the tagged web?

If you are a developer who is working with tags, we want to work with you! Contact us to discuss how your site, community, or tool can become better integrated with Technorati.