How bloggers connect to each other in the Blogosphere

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Here are some of the techniques bloggers use everyday to connect to each other. We think you'll agree that TheGoodBlogs conversations feature is so much more powerful and easy to build your own conversation groups and connect to people think and talk about the same things as you do.

Links

Within your blog post, you link to another blog post that you're talking about.
Limitation: Readers of the other blog post may not know that you wrote about it.

Comments

You leave a comment on a blog post.
Limitation: You may want to write about it extensively on your blog and some comment systems won't allow you to link back to your own blog post.

Tagging (What is a tag? click here to find out.)

Adding a tag to your post allows sites like Technorati and Google to associate your post with a particular topic.
Limitation: The tag itself may be too generic so a search will yield hundreds of pages many of which are not directly what you are talking about.

Trackbacks

Allow bloggers to leave a trackback link (like a comment) on your post that links back to their post.
Limitation: It's hard to follow multiple trackbacks and many blogs don't support that trackbacks.

Carnivals

Get a group of bloggers to blog about a topic and you put up a blog post summarizing all of them.
Limitation: One person has to read and aggregate all the posts and there is usually a deadline associated with it.

Click here to start a conversation.

What is a tag?

A tag is a word or group of words to describe a particular piece of content e.g. a blog entry.

To define a tag that is recognizable by others like Technorati or TheGoodBlogs, create a hyperlink with a rel="tag" attribute.

The format would be <a href="http://someurl/yourTag rel="tag">yourTagDescription"</a>

For example: <a href="http://technorati/tag/tech" rel="tag">technology</a>.

Note the following:

The two most important parts are rel="tag" which indicates it is a tag link AND the tag itself (this is the last part of the url after the last forward slash)
The tag should be have no spaces between the words, replace with '+' sign, e.g. apple+iphone
The url itself can point to anything but it should be a valid destination page, i.e. you do not have to point to Technorati for them to detect the tag.
The tag description does not have to be the same as the tag and is only used for displaying the tag, it is NOT the tag. In the above example, the tag would be tech and not technology

Click here to find out more about the tag specification can be found here

How to construct TheGoodBlogs tag

TheGoodBlogs conversation tag follows the industry-standard convention. However we add a qualifier to the url so that we can identify a specific set of blog posts that belong to a conversation instead of returning any blog post with the tag. TheGoodBlogs conversation tag looks like this:

<a href="http://www.thegoodblogs.com/conversation/conversationId/yourTag rel="tag">yourTagDescription"</a>

conversationId is chosen by you to help qualify the tag
yourTag is the tag that is recognizable by TheGoodBlogs or any other system that detects tagging
youTagDescription is how you describe the tag (usually it is the same as the tag, but it is not compulsory)

By creating a conversation that is a combination of the conversationId and yourTag, we can show you all the blog entries that have the tag but also filter out the noise and show you just the blog entries that explicitly elected to join a particular conversation.

Click here to create your conversation tag and start your conversation