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Thursday, January 6, 2011

Windows Live Writer: Tag Providers

The usage of Windows live writer is largely very simple but one thing kept me confused – the insert tag.

Windows-live-writer-main-page-windows-7

I couldn’t understand what’s the difference between Tags and Categories, and what’s up with the Tag providers:

Windows-live-writer-insert-tag-dialog

So the difference as far as I can see it is that categories are for just your blog.

And Tags are a categories system that works for all the blogs that register to it. Through this Providers other users can reach your site, because the Providers index your blog with the tags you provide – so chose the tags accordingly.   Actually I was wrong and each Tag Provider indexes the site differently but some of them use the tags in their index process. I will post another post on that.

What Provider should I choose?

  • Technorati – Seems to have technological and recreational
  • LiveJournal - Seems to have mostly recreational blogs
  • Flickr – for photos
  • del.icio.us – from Yahoo, seems to have technological and recreational
  • IceRocket – Seems to have technological and recreational
  • 43 Things – don’t really know (weird tag Provider)
  • BuzzNet – Seems to have mostly recreational blogs

Do a search in those sites for your regular post topics, if there are no relevant  result this Provider is not for you.

 

For me the most relevant Tag Providers were del.icio.us and IceRocket since they had developer’s posts on my subjects.

 

I want to post to several Tag Providers, can I do that?

YES YOU CAN. For example in this post I am using some of the tag providers with the tags:

Tag Provider, Windows Live Writer, How-to

How?

Windows-Live-Writer-tag-dialog-multiple-providers

Click the insert when you are on a blank line (if you are on a previous tag line you might overrun your old tag settings (like I did a couple of timesCrying face)).

Windows-Live-Writer-post-multiple-tag-providers

On another post it looks like:

post-on-blogger-multiple-tag-providers-look

Resources:

What is a blog tag provider?