Skandia Team GBR

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Sailing Tags - Global Value

Reading my friend Tillermans (its OK to call you a friend isn't it?) recent post about Reviews of Sailing Gear and the comments have got me thinking... We have in our global conversations some great sailors, some great thinkers and some great combined knowledge for all sorts of sailing in all sorts of boats and all sorts of places/conditions.... BUT we all use different blogging technologies, Blogger, WordPress and of course LiveSailDie blogs (maybe we should all defect to this!)
Now if we could all agree on a mechanism for tagging our posts that was easy, and easily searchable then people could use that to pull together "knowledge" on particular areas... for example, at the bottom of a post about summer wetsuits you could put:


Which becomes the following tag in the post:

The as long as you "ping" Technorati (either automatically through your blogging software or manually) then if you do a search for the tag "Sailing Kit" you'll get all the combined knowledge on sailing kit...

Actually now that I've written this it sounds too hit and miss and complicated, but there must be an easy way for us to "tag" our posts to gain collective opinion in some ways...any ideas? Do we need to create our on "social bookmarking" site like del.iciou.us and add links to the posts into categories on a del.iciou.us sailing site that we collectively create?

Arrgghh..way to complex for this time of night...but something I want to solve and come back to...any ideas out there Tillerman, OG, Litoralis, Tim, Fuff etc etc??

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you are correct... everyone SHOULD defect to livesaildie blogs ;)

I'd be very interested in helping set something up. I do know of http://www.sailr.com that seems quite similar to what you are discussing though.

Adding tags to things is extremelly simple for anyone using lsd blogs or wordpress. Adding tags with blogger i don't think is possible. Don't get me started with why blogger is a piece of crap though. Transfer your blog from blogger to wordpress and i promise you'll never look back!

Back to the original idea, I'm very interested in helping... OG and I are churning out marine websites left right and centre and would love to be involved.

Tillerman said...

Hi my friend - I'm no expert on all these technical options even though I spent 29 years working in IT. But I'm so old I programmed the Y2k bug.

One of my commenters suggested setting up a wiki - that seemed like a cool idea. No idea how to do it though.

As for johnsee's comments on blogger, it certainly is possible to add Technorati tags to post on blogger. Even I have done it so it must be easy!

Anonymous said...

A wiki could be done very easily.

What would we include?

Anonymous said...

The reat thing about wikis is they tend to spawn and really do what people want them to do since anyone can edit!

I'd assume that we'd see articles on sailing blogs... how to blog... how to sail... and a whole heap of other sailing topics.

So far as I can tell there are no other sailing wikis around. Sounds like an awesome idea. I'm happy to set one up with a domain and all... but its your call Ant... you kick started the topic!

Fuff said...

Not sure it would need a lot of tekky input, the idea is fab though.

Tim Coleman said...

I like the idea but I am already heavily commited to other thinks to give it any help.

Anonymous said...

When I get some spare time (won't happen for a couple of weeks at least), I'm happy to expand Sailr a bit (have been planning to get off my ass and make some big improvements).

Adding tagging support isn't a problem, at the moment I do tag all posts that come in, though they're keyword based rather than author defined.