Tagging is the new buzz word in the web scene. Put simply, that’s the practice of organization using freely chosen keywords. Many online services — Flickr, del.icio.us or Technorati — have incorporated a collaborative organization of the web better known as folksonomy. That kind of organization prove to be very efficient when looking at things, far better than the static hierarchical model. Using tags in your blog will drastically improve the navigation between the entries.

WordPress, the blog engine I currently use don’t support natively the concept of tag but hierarchical categories. And actually, a flat list of categories would do the trick. The cat2tag plug-in for WordPress replace the category view by a tag view making the association of multiple tags with your post straightforward.

On the visible side of the blog, if you look at the sidebar, you’ll now see a tag list. It’s the most popular keywords I use to categorize my posts. It’s important for these tags to match the most popular ones from sites like Technorati. It helps users not to be lost in terminology when searching your site and it also helps your blog to be better referenced.

What’s missing, is a tag cloud for the archive page. Tag clouds provide a nice view for archives and shows the most popular topics as bigger words. It’s easy for a users to find out what your blog is all about simply by looking at the tag cloud.

According to the most popular bloggers, tagging will be the next big thing in the blog scene in the couple of years to come. Blog engines will all implement a tagging system and people will be quickly used to it. So, be prepared to the move.