What are tags and how do I use them?

You can use tags to assign keywords to your blog entries that are meaningful to you. Tags provide a useful way to categorize your blog or blog entries and search for blogs or blog entries that are of interest to you. Use the tag cloud to view all tags that are assigned to blog entries in the list to determine the popularity of a tag, and to access blog entries that are associated with a tag.

Before you begin

Tags provide a means of classifying and retrieving content in a way that is meaningful to you. Tags are single words, or multiple words that are connected with hyphens or underscores. For example, social-bookmarking, status_reports, and payroll are all valid tags.

You can choose how the tags in a tag collection are displayed – either in a list or in a cloud. A tag list displays the tags in a list that starts with the most popular tags at the beginning. A tag cloud visualizes the popularity of the tags in the collection by grouping the tags together and displaying the most frequently used tags in larger, darker text and less often used tags in smaller, lighter text. The tag list displays the ten most popular tags only. The tag cloud displays a larger set of the most popular tags, but is limited in the number of tags it can display.

If you are looking for a tag that is not displayed in the collection, search for it by clicking Find a Tag, entering the tag name in the search field, and then clicking the search icon. To find a blog or entry by tag, click a tag from the tag collection. This limits the number of blogs or entries that are displayed to include only blogs that have the tag that you selected. To narrow down the list even further, click another tag. This action filters the list of activities or entries that are displayed to include only blogs that have both tags that you selected.

You can view tags in a list or in a cloud. Click List or Cloud at the end of the tag area to switch the display. When you view a tag cloud, tags are presented in various sizes and colors. The most popular tags are darker and larger than other tags. The slider controls whether all tags display in the cloud or just the more frequently used tags.