We’re experimenting with a new system for connecting bloggers across WordPress.com with people writing about the same topics. We just turned on our global tags system, which means that when you blog about topic X and tag your post with X, you can see everyone else who has done the same. Think of it like Technorati tags for our little community here.
You can browse a zeitgeist of what’s popular in the last 48 hours here or you can type any tag into the URL to browse those posts.
You can begin exploring on tags like culture, politics, blogging, life, or apple.
Over time these should start to drive more and more traffic to blogs that utilize categories.
Let us know any ideas you have for new features along these lines.
WordPress.com News 
Very useful!!
Kool very kool indeed now we can see if any one has posted nearly the same contents or not i really like it
Does it work on multi-language tage like http://wordpress.com/tag/中文/
I noticed that non-english characters are encoded.
Like it.
Terrific, thanks. How about an RSS feed for the top 20 (or so) tags?
My only concern is…on many blogs people click the category links under posts to get to posts on that site in the same category. If people click these and are taken elsewhere it might confuse them.
I’m disappointed that this has been implemented without further work to effectively split the categories and tag systems. At the moment, when I click a tag that was added as a category, it takes me to a global list and not to the remainder of the posts within the stated category.
I have no problem in the principle of tags, but often I just want to browse or collate a set of related entries within a single blog – being taken to a global list is not what I expect when clicking a category associated with a particular entry.
Until the clear division is built between internal categories and external links, can you let me know how to switch off global tags from my blog?
thats pretty cool =D
wow thats great
Matt, this is a very exciting and commendable intitiative. It will come in very handy. I’ve already found a number of blogs that look onteresting, just over the last 5 minutes of surfing! I really encourage you to continue this line of thinking and develop more interactivity in the WP community. I think that will be the key to strong growth.
Thanks again for all the hard work.
Great Idea. Amazed to see Lectures being so popular. Can you also scan the blog title and add them to the tags?
I have a suggestion about tags, whenever we choose one, can you automatically turn uncategorzed off? Alternatively, remove uncategorized under the list of tags and display it only if the blogger has not chosen any tags?
So is your category your tag?
Yep your category is your tag.
This is awesome. I can’t wait to start using this. Thanks!!
This is awesome, and damn covenient. Thanks, both for the idea and implementing it.
That’s great Matt, cudos!! 🙂
great add-on to the blogs
thanks
AWESOME! A very good feature!
I think this is a great idea. However, I agree with Hugh Griffiths’ comment that it wreaks havok upon pre-existing navigation conventions.
An excellent compromise would be to borrow from Flickr and have a link on the individual blog’s category/tag page that routes to the WordPress.com tag page.
Thus: Blog Post > Tag > Blog Tag Page > WordPress tag page
For a blog with a lot of categories like mine, having that link to related content within my blog associated with the post is very, very helpful.
I think that having a link to local and global tag pages would be a great idea.
SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!
Yes, we need links to both the local and the global tags. I have conceived of my blog with local category sorting in mind, and really hope that the global tags (which are beneficial) don’t mess it up.
Fabolous, absolutely terrifc. You guys rock. It would be great if there was something like “Hot Posts of this Category”, referencing the number of views a post recives or the linkbacks.
Just to clarify, there still are local and global tags. Category links in places like your sidebar always go to your blog.
I’m in the “it can be confusing” camp. What used to be an in-blog category is now a domain-wide category.
I’d suggest a setting to toggle categories and tags, defaulted to tags.
When on, the link is labeled “tags” or “category/tag” or “tag category” or something that indicates it’s a tag, not a standard category link (as appears in sidebar).
When off, it is labeled “category” and works as traditional; that is, it takes the user to on-site category posts.
Alternately, flags for both categories and tags, defaulted to “on”. The “category” link (when flag is “on”) under the post takes user to on-site category posts. The (proposed new) “tags” link (when flag is “on”) under the post takes user to on-domain tag posts.
Bottom line is, I like the ability to have tags, but I don’t like the idea of having the traditional “category” link not working as traditionally expected.
Now, aren’t you glad you asked?
Well, Flickr has an icon next to each local tag to get global tags. Could this possibly be put in place? My reasoning behind this is many blogs still use this hierarchy and people will come to any WordPress.com blog and be confused.
just out of curiosity, why are you implementing something like local tag clouds (as opposed to just hooking into del.icio.us or technorati for namespaces) instead of bigger issues like custom templates (just the css even!) or adsense (you’d think splitting the profit on adsense would make, well, sense)?
importing other blogs, yeah. video support, sure. ‘next blog’ button, maybe. proprietary, local tag clouds? huh?
implementing features your competitors have when you already have a boatload of features they don’t seems like the way to go to me.
why be a little better — maybe, depending on what features you want — when you can lean on the warm gooey center that is wordpress and then start adding features that are your competitors only differentiators (like custom templating or adsense) to dominate the market?
in the ‘their features plus more’ contest, you already have the ‘plus more’ covered. what about their features?
m3mnoch.
Matt: I’m clear that there still are local tags/categories in the sidebar. With 53 categories (and growing), that makes it hard for a user to be looking at a photo, scan the sidebar and find the tag for “history” (or whatever).
Another thought, would it be possible to display some sort of link to the Global Tags on our dashboards? Thanks alot.
Sweet! Keep them coming. Is there a way you can make direct links to those tags as well? with links to tags of my posts AND other posts on WP – that would be great!
(forget my last comments suggestion – saw how u guys have worked it out). Its neat!
Very cool! Love it. Thanks.
It does not work in Russian 😦
This is a tremendous idea! I’ve tried it on some tags on my blog and hey… works great!
Great feature. But when I click on Category on any post, I am shifted to global page of categories. I am uable to view my own posts on that category.
This is a great idea for many blogs, but it’s not so good for mine! I categorize posts (which are all book reviews) by the section of the Dewey Decimal system where each book would be shelved in the library. No one else does this (I mean, really, why would they?), so when my readers click on the tag in each post, they’re going to get an error message.
Maybe this could be an optional thing, and bloggers could decide whether to participate? It does seem like a great idea for bloggers who use tags that are more universal than mine.
Using categories as tags
I’m very happy to see that wordpress.com have gotten it’s own little tagcloud, as that has been on top of my wordpress.com wishlist ever since I registrated my first blog at this place.
I am a big fan of tagclouds, and this including the &#…
I’m with Hugh.
That’s awesome, thanks guys!
yay global tags, i like the system a lot! you might want to take a second look at the CSS though, the text is a little outside the left margin in firefox 1.0.7 under linux (ubuntu). Or maybe its just my browser, since the banana smoothie 1.0 theme also looks a little wrong. good job though!
I like to have the tags local as well. It may be driving traffic to other blogs but that takes away traffic from my blog. If I wanted global tags, I would be adding them myself.
I like the idea, but wonder if we couldn’t have both categories and tags. In other words, I would like to still be able to have local categories to browse within my own blog, yet also have a tag cloud globally. I think this will help both readers and bloggers.
I’ve got to say, I am impressed with the recent improvements at wordpress.com.
An Indonesian Journalist: My news is my biography.
This is cool! Ideas along these lines? Yes — and sorry if I’m insistant. Please offer the possibility to use tags that are different from categories. 🙂
WordPress Tags Search
Did you know that you can search for tags on WordPress.com?
Type
https://wordpress.com/tags
or just https://wordpress.com/tags/tagname
on the location bar/address bar and press enter. You’ll get the results.
Mozilla/SeaMonk…
Any response from WP regarding concerns about global tags vs local tags?
From a UI perspective, have a navigation item do different things depending on where it is in the layout isn’t really clear. I really like the idea of implementing the tags like flickr does where any click of a tag sends you records that user has tagged with a separate option that says:
See all public photos tagged with WHATEVER
I realize of course that wordpress.com is your site and you can do whatever you want on it.
I absolutely think the global tags feature should be optional. Up until they were turned on, I was using the categories included with each post as a quick-link to more of MY postings in the same categories. Yes, I realize that’s still how the sidebar works, but that’s not enough, in my opinion.
While I understand the value of community, this is just not something I’m interested in nor is it something I need for my site. I think it’s a great feature if you want it. But it’s a big, negative change if you don’t.
+1 to global and local tags à la Flickr and del.icio.us. I’d like to be able to point to all my posts tagged with something, but in many situations it would sense to point to all wordpress.com posts tagged with that something.
Not sure I agree with making the global part of it optional, though. Instead, make it both local and global, with the links on each individual weblog going to the local tag, with the local tag page linking to the global tag.
Of course after posting that I see that my local tags are on the sidebar. Which I would have known if I read Matt’s comment.
Hate it. I hate displaying my category list because I like for my layout to be neat and tidy but now I’m forced to so that others can find my posts on the same topic.
Straight up lame.
That said, it should be an option to turn on and off. Cause it sucks.