Well now that tag-and-ping from Sean Wu has hit the market there has been an up tick in the amount of spam on web sites. I don’t blame the product, instead I blame the people trying to make a quick buck.
In general the method sucks. I hate spam in my email box. I hate it in tag-bait. When someone tries to jackpot the system it works for a while, but in the new Web 2.0 world it will not last and honest marketers can use the technology.
The last time this happened it was under the blog-and-ping banner. I certainly saw my share of posts that were scrubbed from other sites. It was a bad year. Now we have a new method d’-jour for marketing.
[TAG]Tag-and-ping[/TAG] has taken over now. This time it is different.
First, it is great that the writer is in charge of what gets indexed. No more need to write the same phrases over and over. In the old world we added pages and in time they would be indexed by the search engines.
And we were its slaves. Although it is still that way in some respects. By tagging your posts with certain select tags, you can have it read by people that are looking for that tag. Trick is to keep the post on the page.
So keep writing. Second, the traffic is quick to come. When I post a blog post I get traffic within minutes of posting. It’s the most amazing thing. Try that in the old way, you were lucky if you were indexed in a week or two. As long as you write good articles you can get traffic. Tag your post and away you go.
Problems come in because some dipwad will figure out a way to use it to annoy people. This has lead to the death of some social bookmarking services. My guess that is what happened to “Jots”. The week before its death, many tags were taken up by bad posts.
Unfortunately, it did not turn the corner for the best part of tagging. If an engine survives and figures out a way to filter out the most of the garbage, they will survive and then be able to take advantage of the third great thing about social bookmarking.
Third, since tag and ping is human based, each social bookmarking engine seems to allow the users to flag posts as “bad for the net”. This gives the power back to the users.
[TAG]Web 2.0[/TAG] is all about empowering the people. Away with complicated algorithms that work but take a long time. Users can be quick and decisive. Once a person gets flagged too many times their site is dead.
This will force them to churn out more sites with an ever dwindling time to live and with any luck, that method will go the way of the dodo. Although not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, tag-and-ping is a lot more useful than blog-and-ping and will be a great way to stop the marketers who spam. Welcome to the new world.
Todd Peterson, Guest writer, CD-Elite Member. host of http://tagalizer.com and http://tagalizeit.com