10 Things You Can Do With Jiglu Tags - #1. Tag Your Blog

Welcome to the first in a series of posts about all the things you can do with Jiglu Tags. Ten of them to be exact, but you've probably figured that out by now.

So why automatic tagging?

Because manually tagging isn't the most fun activity in the world, even if it does help people find interesting things in your blog. It's hard to decide the best tags to use, it's hard to remember what tags you've used before and hardly anybody ever goes back to their old blog entries and updates them when they add a new tag that might be relevant.

That's why in a moment of inspiration while standing in the middle of a garden on the outskirts of Palo Alto we decided to take the automatic tagging technology we'd invented for e-mail and let people use it for their blogs too.

Signing up

So how do you get it?

Well, first you need to sign-up for the service. Just head over to jiglu.com and enter the URL of your blog plus a few details so we can create you an account for you to manage things with. Once you've done that we'll give you a widget to put on your blog.

To make things easy, you can install the Jiglu widget on Blogger or Typepad with just the click of a button. If you have your own hosted Wordpress blog then there's a plug-in you can download and install. For everyone else it's usually easiest just to copy the single line of JavaScript into a suitable point in your templates. It won't currently operate on Wordpress.com or sites that don't support JavaScript widgets like MySpace - sorry.

I'm in ur blog, slurpin' ur content

So how does it work?

Once you've installed the widget on your blog, the first time you view a page with it on we go off and spider your site. First we'll try and find a feed on your home page to help us figure out which pages are permalinks and which are the index pages.

On a permalink page we'll show just the tags for that page. On index pages, such as the blog home page, we'll show the tags for all the entries that we find on that page by checking their URLs. Most of the time we get it right, but for some less common blog systems sometimes we have to just treat everything as a permalink. If that happens to you, tell us - often we can do something about it.

Once we've got that figured out, we then start going through all the pages on your blog and extracting the content from each page. The feed also helps us figure out where on the page to find it, so when we're creating tags we can ignore common page furniture like navigation links. There's currently a limit of 4,000 pages per site - if yours is bigger then drop us a line.

The complicated bit we try and keep secret

Each page we put through some nifty natural language processing to figure out some likely phrases from it that might make good tags. Once we've got all the pages processed, we then do some number crunching across all the possible tags to decide which really are important in the site.

Our main decision when doing this is whether or not it will improve navigation within the site. If it doesn't appear often enough then we won't let it in. If it's too common we'll also probably decide not to include it. We also try and give a suitable number of tags for the size of your site. At the moment we think this is a bit high for bigger sites but we're working on that - tell us if that's a problem on your site and we can experiment.

People and events

Automatically deciding good tags means that Jiglu is great for sites that are talking about new things as it can intelligently figure out the names of new products or services without having to be told about them. It also figures out names of people and dates (what we call events) and we'll be adding some further categorisation smarts later this spring.

Giving it all back

Once Jiglu has decided on the tags, it then starts displaying them in the widget and optionally in the text of your blog entries too - but more of that tomorrow. Then when you click on a tag you'll be shown where else on the site it's been talked about as well. And as you add new entries to your blog we'll pick those up too and start adjusting the tags accordingly. We'll even automatically link back to all those places in the past you've mentioned a particular topic.

Tomorrow we'll look at how you can change the look of the widget to fit the style of your blog.