Check out this screen shot taken from my action figure review video a few minutes ago (clicking will take you to the original video page):

Do you see small orange blocks in the comments area?

I simply entered   #OMG     #LOL     #FAIL   into the comment submission field.

After posting the comment with these hashtags, each one of them showed up as a separate orange block of text. Clicking any one of these orange tags will take you to a global, aggregated thread for the designated tag. They appear to be working throughout YouTube now.

If you want to try it for yourself, you’ll need to place a hash symbol directly before the known acronyms in CAPS; the feature doesn’t seem to apply with lowercase characters. Apparently,  #FTW  works, too.

Kinda neat, eh? I have no idea if they’re going to be expanding this to support every popular keyword, but ATM, it seems to be for these popular acronyms. I don’t know WTF they were thinking, but I (for one) appreciate the feature!

If you discover any other orange’d tag there, let me know!

YouTube Adds Colored Tags in Comments

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If I were to tag my dogs, I would use words such as: wicket, pixie, dog, puppy, paws, pet, tail, wag, and so on. Tagging things is second nature to me now. But I’ve come to realize that not everyone knows what tags are, or why they should be using them.

To put it simply, tags are keywords that are used to make your post/picture/whatever easier to find. When you look for something via a Google search, you type keywords into the search box. Let’s say you’re looking for the best monitor to buy. You would start by searching something like “monitor review” or similar, right? Those are called keywords! They are what leads you to the results that you see.

If you have a website or blog, you definitely want to use good keywords. How else will people find what you’ve written? Using tags is the easiest way for people to find you! If you write about your dogs and use good dog-related tags, people searching for dogs may just hit on your site!

The reason I started talking about tags is due to an email I received from Olrik! He asked about tags, and how useful they are. He was writing his blog posts through Windows Live Writer. In that program, there’s an option to set up some tags. He’s no professional writer, but he does want to start becoming more professional.

Using the built-in feature allows you to choose from pre-set tags and keywords that will apply to your content. They are live tag selections, which are similar in nature to Google Suggest.

If you’re not already using tags, you should probably start. After all, you are probably not only creating content for yourself, right? You want to be heard – and you shall!

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What are Tags?

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Monit wrote: “This is a Top 5 list on how to fix up a messy music library. Maybe it’s just the organization freak in me, but I can’t stand it when I see a bunch of music files with missing or inaccurate tags that are tossed all over the place. Personally, all of my songs are MP3s, but some of these programs will work with other formats as well.”

• Fix Those Tags This is probably the most useful thing you can do for a messy music library. Having inaccurate or missing ID3 tag info makes it difficult to find your music on your computer, and especially on portable devices. This is the case when dealing with large libraries. A great program that I use is MP3Tag. It processes information very quickly, and has a bunch of small tools to fix file tags. When you first start the program, you can use the “Filename to Tag” feature, which automatically grabs information from the filename and throws it into the Artist and Title tags. Once this is done, the rest is pretty simple. You can either manually enter the rest of the tags, or let a program such as Music Brainz or Windows Media Player (Options>Libray>Retrieve Additional Info from the Internet) fill in the proper Album, Year, Track, Genre and Composer fields. MusicBrainz is available for the Mac, and I hear EasyTag is another great tag fixer.
• Normalize the Volume How many times have you been listening to a song at full blast because it was really quiet, only to have your ears shattered to pieces when the next track is cued up? To avoid this, use a program like MP3Gain to normalize the volume of your songs. Keep in mind that some artists like to have certain songs on their albums louder than others, so consider using Album Gain to hold those differences, while still keeping the volume of all tracks around the same. If you don`t really share your music, pick a volume that you’re comfortable with. MP3Gain defaults to 89 decibles, but I prefer my music to be normalized at 92db because they still don’t clip from distortion, and they’re closer to the 95db most retails CDs are recorded at (plus your friends will probably be less annoyed if you decide to share some songs).
• Add album art Most modern Operating Systems and MP3 players have the ability to view album art. This makes finding your music very easy, and you’ll just enjoy your music a lot more. iTunes and Windows Media Player can both add album art to tracks automatically. Personally, I just go on Amazon, and use the high resolution album art they supply.
• Store the files properly Be sure to store your music in some sort of organized folder structure. As your library grows, you’ll thank yourself later. Personally, I have all my music stored in my music folder (surprising?). I then have about 5 different genre folders where I store my music. As far as file naming goes, I stick to the standard “Artist – Title.mp3″ that most people use. I already have track numbers stored in the files, and let my media players handle that.
• Fix Up Files as you download them Once you’ve fixed up your library (which may take a few days), keep your music organized as you buy or download it. The nice thing about buying your music online is the fact that it’s already properly tagged. That`s not a huge issue though, as it’s very easy to fix up songs if they’re on CD or from a music blog. This step is really important as it’s much easier to fix 4 or 5 tracks at once, compared to a couple hundred.

FirstRSS ERROR: "http://shop.tagjag.com/products/mp3" NOT FOUND!

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How to Manage your MP3 Files and Tags

In his latest “State of the Blogosphere” report, Technorati founder Dave Sifry finally conceded defeat to spam from BlogSpot and .info domains. His team of developers will be issuing Technorati 3.0 SP1 within a few weeks to address this climate shift.

The impending update will transmogrify Technorati.com from a hub of live Web content into a portal where only the latest spam posts and splogs are indexed and displayed. All junk entries, all the time! It’s a market that’s gone largely underserved until now.

A-List mortgage and erectile dysfunction bloggers were not available for comment.

Source: Technorati.com
Domain: Technoerrati.com

[Use the Coupon Code "bLaugh" to save 10% on your next GoDaddy purchase]

Tagging Technorati

Don’t expect every one of these searches to yeild results, though. The output was generated by a single OPML file and the Optimal OPML WordPress Plugin. Looking for other easy ways to display the OPML from Gada.be right now. Hell, entirely new sites could be built on top of the OPML we produce – much like RSS, it’s a poor man’s API.

Over 300 Tag Searches in One Spot

It’s amazing what happens when you email the developer of a WordPress plugin – they respond. At least, most of ‘em do (I’m still waiting to hear back from a couple of ‘em right now, including Red Alt on being able to search posts from his admin search plugin). After blasting a note to Chris Davis about his community-based tagger, I sent a note off to Christine Davis (no relation) about some shortcomings in the current Ultimate Tag Warrior. I wanted UTW to copy tags into the META keywords tag. She responded with code which needed to be tweaked a bit by Shayne:

[php]< ?php if (is_tag()) { ?>
< meta name="keywords" content="‘%tagdisplay%’, ‘default’=> ‘, %tagdisplay%’)); ?>” />
< ?php } else if (is_single()) { ?>
< meta name="keywords" content="‘%tagdisplay%’, ‘default’=> ‘, %tagdisplay%’)); ?>” />
< ?php } ?>[/php]That’s for all you SEO types out there who are also using the wildly-popular Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin (and I’m not just saying that because it supports Gada.be). This is fun!

Ultimate Tag Warror META Keywords