The lesson to be learned from IABC's choice of a four word lengthy tag for tracking postings and photos seems to be: if it isn't simple, it won't work.
All the tagged items so far on Technorati are from IABC's own blog. No one else who's blogging of posting photos about the IABC international conference being held in Washington D.C. have been able to figure out how to make their tags match the one IABC suggests.
Compare that to the technology conference Gnomedex, which had hundreds of tagged postings, and you can see that simplicity pays.
(Tags are way to identify a web page with information on a topic that others might find relevant. On Technorati, you can view postings and photos with a common tag, and you can browse around different tags.)
Update: Chris Hall, the web guy handling IABC's blog, suggests I might be nitpicking to worry about whether Technorati tags are functioning the way they're intended. He also suggests I not assume the problem lies with IABC the next time anything doesn't appear to be working.
Fair enough. Any technorati tags about the IABC conference that used all four words in sequence showed up fine if you
searched for all four words. And anyone who was guessing at the
possible word combination to use as a tag still had a good likelihood
of successfully searching for postings if they used "iabc conference"
or some similar search that used a couple of the words from the
four-word tag.
I still think any tag that uses four words is probably too long for the kind of use proposed. But I'm probably nitpicking. ;-)
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