The excessively sharp-eyed of you may have noticed that I have recently switch from listing tags at the end of posts to using WordPress tags at the end of posts. Here’s why. Not that you should care.

When tagging first took off, there weren’t a lot of good places to link your tags to. So, I chose to have them link to Technorati because Technorati was then the leading search engine for blogs. Plus, Technorati had taken the lead in making itself tag-worthy. Plus, Technorati was founded by a friend of mine — David Sifry — who I trusted (and still do trust) to do the Right Thing. Also, I was on the Technorati board of advisers (uncompensated), so I had some basic familiarity with the site and the the people. As a result, when you click on one of my old-style tags, it does a search for tags at Technorati and shows you the results. For example, here’s a tag to try: [Tags: taxonomy ].

A couple of years ago, Word Press — the blogging software I use — introduced its own tagging capability. Instead of my having to hand-create links to the tags I want to use (actually, I wrote a little javascript to do it for me), I can enter tags and Word Press will turn them into links that aggregate all of my own postings that I’ve tagged that way. At the bottom of this post, you can try out the taxonomy link.

This is a further step into narcissism, for rather than seeing what the rest of the world has tagged “e-gov” (or whatever), you now see only my posts tagged that way. But I suspect that is probably what most users expect and want when they click on a tag at the bottom of a post. If you want to search all posts by everyone that have a certain tag, Technorati and other sites will do it for you.

(By the way, many thanks to Brad Sucks for writing the scripts that extracted my old tags and auto-inserted them as Word Press tags. He says the scripts are too focused to be of general use, so don’t ask. But do buy his music.)