Did you know? Tags

One of the most powerful tools of Netscape is our tags feature.

Tags are descriptive words you can add to your stories to make them easier to find. For example, a story about a new iPod might have the followings tags: Apple, iPod, mp3, Steve Jobs. All stories for a specific tag can be found via a very basic URL structure, which you can type into your browser's address bar:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/[tag name]

In this example, you would replace [tag name] with whatever specific tag you are looking for; for tags composed of multiple words, you would put a + between the words. For example, the URL for the President Bush tag would be:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/president+bush

When you submit a story to Netscape, make sure that you enter up to 5 descriptive tags separated by commas to each of your stories. Tags that contain multiple words, such as digital audio player do not need to be included within quotation marks. However, for tags that include punctuation, such as XYZ Widgets, Inc., please wrap these in quotations, e.g. "XYZ Widgets, Inc."


Figure 1: When you submit a story or video to Netscape, the tag field appears immediately beneath the Channel drop-down menu.

Adding tags makes your stories easier to find for other members, but tags can also be a great tool for finding the content you are looking for on Netscape or even organizing the stories you submit.

Keep reading after the break for more tips and tricks related to tags...

Figure 2: Hot Tags for the last 100 hours are listed on the Homepage.

If you are doing research on home prices, you could look to the home prices tag (http://www.netscape.com/tag/home+prices/) to see if there are any recent and relevant Netscape stories. Using tags, you can also use Netscape as a bookmarking service for stories that interest you. For example, if I were creating a list of my favorite websites, I could make up a tag that other members would most likely never use, like ckfavsites. I could then submit stories to Netscape and add this tag, then any time I wanted to look at all my favorite sites, I would simply go to http://www.netscape.com/tag/ckfavsites/ to find them. This feature has many potential uses, as you could create a specific tag for an event, like jimandlisawedding08 for Jim and Lisa's wedding. Then both Jim and Lisa and all of Jim and Lisa's family and friends could be told to submit links using this tag to Netscape with any suggestions they may have for the location, food, videographer, or photographer for the wedding.

As I mentioned in my post about subscribing to Netscape at The Movies, every tag in the system has its own RSS feed (if you are unfamiliar with RSS, you can read up on it on Wikipedia) that can be found via the URL structure:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/[tag name]/rss/

In this example, [tag name] would be replaced with whatever specific tag whose RSS feed you wanted to subscribe to. If you wanted to find the RSS feed for the iPod tag, for example, you would look to:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/ipod/rss/

You can also use tags to flag local stories. To tag a story to a particular location, include its ZIP code and/or City. For example, if your story happened in Williamsburg, New York, tag it with: Williamsburg, 11211 along with other tags that describe the story. Then, instead of going to the tag for 11211, anyone living in that zip code could simply click on the Local News link in his/her member box to go see the local news and weather for that zip code: http://www.netscape.com/local/11211

Can you think of any other ways the tag feature can be used? Share with us in the comments.