node.live

Whilst browsing through the site, you may have noticed the list of words at the bottom right-hand-side of a post's view: 

These are the 'tags' that the author of the post has chosen to best describe the content of their post. Each word you see is a link to a page that lists all of the posts on the node website with that tag. For example, if I click on the tag 'University ', I will be presented with the following page, a list of all the posts tagged 'University': 

The tags functionality on node.live extends even further. At the bottom of every page is the current node 'Tag Cloud' (entitled 'popular tags'):

This Tag Cloud is a dynamic visual depiction of the tags used on node.live. The more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font and listed towards the front of the cloud. In the above image, for example, the tags 'IT' and 'Learning' are the most popular tags on the website when the screenshot was taken. Therefore, the largest number of posts are tagged with these words. If you scroll to the bottom of this page you are viewing, you will probably find a different list and order of words in the tag cloud, and this is part of the appeal of tags.

The 'categories' fields in blog and book posts

The place where you enter your tags is in the 'categories' fields on your post submission form. There are 2 types of tag on the node website - 'Node Tags' and 'Node Free Tags'.

Node Tags are a list of tags that are compulsory for your post, a list of resonably broad tags that can describe most content that you could potentially post. To select morethan one tag from the list, control-click on your selections. This list of tags is constantly being updated, so please let us know if you would like a tag added that isn't there already.

Node Free Tags are your own optional 'free' tags, other tags that you choose yourself to describe your post best. As you type, node searches all of the free tags already used previously to see if anybody else has used the tag already, at which point you can select the same Free Tag that others have chosen.

Please see the following links if you wish to read more about any of the above. 

Wikipedia: 'Folksonomy'

Wikipedia: 'Tags'  

del.icio.us: 'Tags'

More from node.live's admin-j about tagging.