How Tagging Matters for Writers Who Blog

These are the labels or tags
used for this post.

As writers use blogging as a platform for developing and publishing their ideas, they should not omit using tags (also known as "labels" or "hashtags") with each of their posts. Why bother?

There is a practical angle for tagging: the instructor can find and sort student posts more easily. But tags play a greater role. Tagging has to do with ways of thinking and finding that go along with online writing. Bottom line: tagging helps both to automate and to socialize online content. And for writers perfecting their ideas, tagging helps you reflect on and focus your writing.

But first, what are these things? You can see the images I've inserted that show where labels are added when composing a post in Blogger, and how these appear at the bottom of a post.

Labels or tags appear below a post
(and sometimes via a widget on the side of a blog)

Tags are Metadata
Metadata is data about data. It is critical to helping machines sort and prioritize information. Whenever someone tags something, the computers give more emphasis to those words in search results. Tags get you found by machines, and by humans who have learned how to search for tags and to find content and users that are associated with tags. Interestingly, their usefulness isn't related closely to their formality. They actually work best when they are a casual part of posting content.

Welcome to Our Wonderland

We are among those at Brigham Young University studying literary criticism and exploring our favorite literary works in the process. In this blog you will find personal literary narratives, as well as the documented efforts by students to analyze and research works of literature so that we, and others, can better enjoy them.

Creative Commons License 3.0 / Lightgrapher

A Common Wonderland.
We have studied the works of Lewis Carroll, and this has given us a starting point as we now explore other literary works of personal interest. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass have provided us practice in literary analysis and research. These works have also provided us some metaphors and starting points for discussing literature more broadly.

Going "Down the Rabbit Hole"
To "go down the rabbit hole" has become a phrase -- based on Alice going down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland -- meaning to get lost in some strange new world. Well, the world of blogging (or of the internet more broadly) is certainly one of those rabbit holes. But the world of literary criticism or scholarship is another such world. It is all too possible to become disoriented among the multitude of writings and analysis given to literary works. How do we make sense of it all? How do we adjust how we talk about literature in our highly mediated present-day culture?

Starting with the Personal
We will keep ourselves from getting lost by staying oriented to the personal. We will not be afraid of claiming subjective interest in literary works we love. And we will not be afraid to share our personal stories of more objective forays into making sense of various wonderlands of literature.