Before the reaction is addressed, Google explains the tagging feature quite clearly:

Tag approval
You’ll receive an email letting you know you’ve been tagged in a photo. By default, name tags by people in your circles are automatically approved. You can view or remove tags at any time on the photos homepage in Google+ as well as the Photos tab on your Google profile. You can also update your settings to manually approve every name tag. When a tag is approved, the tagged photo is posted to the Google+ stream.

Tag visibility
Name tags are visible to people that can view the album. Approved tags link to your Google profile. Unapproved tags are still visible on the photo, but they don’t link to your profile. In addition to appearing on the photo itself, photos of you with approved tags will be displayed on the Photos tab on your Google profile and the photos homepage in Google+.

Now, the fact that tagged photos automatically appear in a Google+ stream is what has people up in arms. Understandably so. Sharing is not something that should be standard. Users should be able to pick and choose what they share. Apparently, from Google’s eyes, when you add a tag, you are agreeing to share it. Nevertheless, people aren’t happy with this discovery. Over at the Picasa help forum, reaction isn’t kind:

Apparently I can no longer organize my web album without sharing it to the world!?
In this help doc http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1306701 you say that “Tagging is sharing”, that means that if I choose to rganize my web album with tagging people in it I (by default and no option not to) share it to everyone I tag EVEN if I do not share it with a single soul! This is WRONG and a major PRIVACY concern!

And [sic]s are included:

I completely agree. This move goes against Google’s supposed philosophy of controlled sharing within circles. Like many others, I use PicasaWeb as a backup and for organising my photos, choosing exactly who I would like to see them. I pay for the extra storage and have been very happy with it. Why on Earth would I want everybody that I tag in my photos for organisational purposes to be emailed about it, and then able to share my album with whoever he or she pleases? I also do not want others to have control of the tagging of my photographs, which I organise so meticulously. PicasaWeb was not a social network, and forcing it into becoming one renders it useless to all of the people who have used it for so many years. I thought that Google were going about + the right way up until now, but this is a disgrace.

And one more:

Here’s a specific use case which highlights why this is completely unacceptable unless something is changed:
I import all my photos from my camera using picasa to a “photos” folder. This folder is “synced” – meaning any changes are updated live to the web album. Eventually, I like to reorganise those photos copied from the camera into separate folders… but this takes time. In the meantime, if “people” tab in picasa identifies some of my friends in some of those photos… well, guess what? If I accept the people tags (without easily knowing which folder those photos were from) then the WHOLE FOLDER is shared with them… and the potentially anyone else in the world.
Why is this REALLY, REALLY BAD? Here’s an example of things I’ve taken photos of that are in my photo folder right now: my passport, my lease, my room and personal items, friends in private gatherings, etc.
Someone could potentially use this information for identity theft, etc.

There is NO WAY that this is going to work, google. NO FREAKING WAY.

Is this overreaction or is Google subtly pushing Google+ on to the masses now, by making tagging such a universal sharing feature? Comments like the ones featured go on for two pages, and if this isn’t addressed by Google, it will only get worse from here. Of course, one wonders why someone would take a picture of their passport and post into a publicly-shared album, but then again, the user obviously didn’t know they were sharing such images.

Currently, there isn’t much response to glean further information from, but you can bet if the outcry gets loud enough, Google will take Picasa’s tagging feature back to the drawing board, at least in terms of Google+.

Essentially, the Sheikh in question — Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan — essentially tagged the earth. The Sun has some details:

The mega-rich sheikh, 63 — a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi — in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates — boasts a £14 billion fortune that is second only to the Saudi king’s.

Who says the world’s addiction to oil never led to anything creative? The report also reveals the letters in the ostentatious tag are a “kilometer” high and the entire tag spans two miles. As you can see:

It’s also obvious that Shiekh Hamad is something of an egomaniac, or just a massive troll. Both are probably accurate, all things considered. One has to wonder, however, if he’s upset his name appears upside down on these satellite images.

Currently, the only types of pages that can be tagged are Brands & Products or People pages, but Facebook says they are “looking to expand this functionality to more page categories over time.”

As usual, Facebook is reminding us that privacy features are still in place, and that just because you tag a photo of a Coke with the Coke brand page, it doesn’t mean your photo has to appear on that brand’s page- unless of course you want it to.

The privacy of the photo is always respected when a Page is tagged in a photo. If a photo post is published to “everyone,” then it can appear publicly on the Photos tab of the Page and the Page admins can see it. If it’s just published for someone’s friends, only their friends will be able to see that photo. Page Admins can always choose to disable tagged photos from appearing on the Photos tab by going into Edit Page > Posting Options > and unchecking “Users can add photos”.

Last fall, Facebook launched new features for photos, such as higher resolution images and that nifty black-bordered viewer for browsing. They also retooled the uploading functionality and allowed users to tag multiple photos at the same time.

This will obviously promote more interaction with brands on Facebook as well as celebrities’ fan pages. Just think how many times people upload a picture of someone holding a Starbucks coffee or upload a pic from a certain restaurant or sporting venue? If users have a picture with Kanye West and a bunch of their friends, for instance, they can tag him along with all their friends.

Since 2009, users have been able to tag pages in their status updates and wall posts. This just takes that to a whole new level.

What do you think? Will you use the new feature?

• Unofficialseoblog
• Coverage by other SEM communities
• Images

Below is an alphabetical index of our coverage:

• A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Effectively Leveraging Social networking
• Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in SMM
  
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
  
• Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Linkbait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Micro Communities
• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

Coverage by other SEM communities:

• Affiliate Tip
• Aim Clear Blog
• Alt Search Engines
• Bruce Clay
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Round Table
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Marketing Gurus
• Square Oak
• Tamar.com
• Tannerhobin.com
• Top Rank Blog
• WebProNews

Images:

• Top Rank Blog

• Dennis Goedegebuure


• Hilarious pictures of Mr. Moderator

Comments

Tag:

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers: Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI

Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

Danny introduces Guillaume Bouchard the CEO of NVI Solutions who is the first speaker of this session.

About Social bookmarking, Guillaume says it is when Internet users can store, organize, search and share bookmarks. Thanks to "nofollow" links, there is lesser less link juice. Popular social bookmarking sites are Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and Furl.

On the other hand, bookmarking sites also use tags. This is a collaborative practice through which you can identify content in a certain way. These help in:

• Indexing your site better on search engines.
• Receiving a high number of organic incoming links.
• Creates a strong presence within social communities.
• Promotes brand awareness.
• boosts traffic from alternate sources.
• impacts traditional media.

How To tag Effectively

• Find out how people are tagging the sites you want to remember later.
• If you are clueless and doubtful, choose the tag that is most popular and relevant in the tag clouds.
• Avoid separating tags with commas.
• Set a list of standards by which you want to exchange with others.

Manual Tagging

• It should have been online for more than 10 years(hyperlinks, anchor text, keywords).
• Design your own set of tags to represent your content.
• Incorporate images, boost high participation rates by letting users personalize and make. their own tags that they associate to the given image.
• These should also be submitted to del.icio.us, stumble, and flickr.

Automatic Tagging

• Automatically, through an algorithm it extracts tags from the content
• This can incorporate different user’s users tags
• This does not grow or expand due to human creativity.
• This is all about the user experience.
• A great example is FaceBook.




• However, automatic tagging is considered more "blackhat".

Abuse & Content Degradation

• Content visibility is often created through the intentional misuse of tags
• As social bookmarking and tagging sites become more mainstream, the added incentive for manipulation will result in decreasingly reliable content unless their algorithms get a lot smarter
• Leading social marketing sites use tagging

Technorati

• A search engine for blogs that works on a tag based system. Popular blogs get ranked on the basis of unique links.
• Start a blog for your client, write several blog posts with high -profile tas, and claim it through Technorati
• If you receive a high amount of pings in a short period of time, it means you will feature in the popular section of the site for searches, blogs, videos, movies and news.

Flickr

• Submit photos that make sense to the industry that you are trying to reach.
• Select the correct tags from the list of popular tags
• If you want your images to appear in Technorati, tag them appropriately and make them public.
• Use the photostream on your blog
• Make other users link and comment on your images with the same tags that you initially selected.
• Make friends and share pictures.

YouTube

• Mashups area hit here.
• In YouTube content has more importance than the tags used.
• Use Digg, StumbleUpon and other social marketing sites to promote your video.
• Ask friends to comment on your videos.
• Pass on your video to friends.

FaceBook

• Make attractive and interesting corporate profiles.
• Brainstorm on widgets and use the application that is exclusive to your industry.
• Offer a good enough reason to join your community.
• These groups needs a moderator.
• Invite people in your company.

Next up was Michael Gray, President of Atlas Web Service who gave the audience a comprehensive tour of del.icio.us. Michael compared tags to old-fashioned Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox bookmarking albeit with more flexibility and community features. A really great thing of del.icio.us is its feature that lets it subscribe to tags. Michael says tags are like labels, but one must keep a check of the commas. Different groups of people will have a different perspective of your pages, giving your pages more "tags".

Obviously, you want to be in the ‘popular’ page. As this can bring in as much traffic as Digg. The benefit of del.icio.us is that it has a wider demographic reach and has less to do with techie things. Like Digg, you too can do a ‘shoutout’ in del.icio.us, this is not as powerful but is pretty effective. del.icio.us does not apply the ‘noFollow’ tag, so you wouldn’t be receiving any link love. However, there will be incoming traffic. A word of caution : Separate words should have a ‘+’ as tag delimiter and not space.

How to Expand Your Exposure

Find the type of posts that people are bookmarking for your subject. Tailor-design your content to fit popular tags. Your page should integrate bookmarking widgets and buttons, good titles, careful timing and advised tagging. Remember that del.icio.us updates its popular page every 4 hours. Time your bookmarking efforts in such a way that you can take advantage of update timeframes. Make your friends influence the suggested tags. Lastly, do not create multiple sock puppet accounts, they will get discontinued.

Last speaker of the session is Neil Patel, the CTO of Advantage Consulting Services who is here to discuss StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has over 3 million users and brings in over 12,000 visitors per day. And the best part? The traffic lasts long. This is great for branding. The demographic of users show more men and lesser females. However, users are aged 45 and above. Meaning, they have more money to spend.

First, you got to install the toolbar in order to use it. There is a feature of an "I like" or "I don’t like" thumbs up or down icon. The more thumbs up you get, the higher the incoming traffic.

Second,Create an account, make friends and send stories to them. At StumbleUpon, titles don’t carry much weightage as here the pages are being served. However, keywords are required for StumbleUpon. Review carries equal importance as topic or tags. Sending stories to your friens is not considered spamming as it is a StumbleUpon service.

Comments

Tag:

First up was Guillaumue Bouchard, CEO, NVI. 

He said the benefits of social bookmarking are that it creates a presence in communities and can influence traditional media.

On tagging pick a tag that is relevant to your site and do not use commas.

Using a broad tag does not help your site. Manual tagging works well with sites that have videos and pictures

Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service said that del.icio.us is a great bookmarking tool to share with other people and that you are able to track tags.

To use del.icio.us to bring traffic find posts that people are bookmarking and find the tags people are using.

You can expand your exposure by identifying tags that are popular and then tailor your content to fit those tags.

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services said that you can use StumbleUpon to bring traffic to your site.

You must install the toolbar or you cannot leverage the site. Submit something from your site that you like and use your friends to create traffic.

WebProNews Video anchor Kara Ratliff contributed to this report.

“If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud!” wrote Robyn Tippins on the MyBlogLog Blog.  “Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer).  Tag anyone who spams you with the term schmoe.”

Right.  Well, several notable figures didn’t take to that too kindly.  Search industry guru Danny Sullivan responded, “Internally, you know, I like to call anyone who stereotypes an entire industry by the actions of a small number within it kind of stupid.

“Fair enough,” Sullivan continued, “to ask anyone seeing MyBlogLog spam to tag that with the word spam.  But calling an entire industry a bunch of spammers?  Not smart, frankly, when some of those in that industry also have communities that thrive on MyBlogLog.  Oh, and not smart when MyBlogLog is just one of many Yahoo properties that effectively sit at the top of the social media optimization food chain by optimizing the ‘social’ to drive everything to them.”

But Andrew R.H. Girdwood took a slightly different approach to Tippins’s comments.  After considering some negative possibilities, he concluded, “This is a little joke – schmoe is funny.  It could well be the case that Robyn didn’t mean to suggest that everyone who offers social media consultations is a spammer.”

And in the “Comments” section, Tippins herself responded, writing, “I love social media people, shoot I’m a social media junkie myself.  Social Media Optimizer was a good way to explain what spammers do when they take social media applications and game them (optimize is a kind word).”

Tippins ended her post by swearing, “No SMO hate here, I promise!”

It’ll be worth seeing if the situation goes any further.  As an (unintended) experiment in PR, updates, and, perhaps, social media optimization, the results have been quite interesting.  Oh, and by the way – MyBlogLog did indeed introduce tagging.

Naaman relegated Berners-Lee’s vision of a cooperative Web where people and machines get along in digitized, organized artificial intelligence harmony via tags (told ya, this is some heady, quantum stuff) to a pipe dream. Naaman reminds Berners-Lee that people, in general, especially collectively, just ain’t that bright.

The Semantic Web, you see, relies in large part on people tagging their online media in a rather standardized, academic, high-minded, meaningful, and structured way. And Naaman thinks that’s too much to ask:

There is no way that we can engage the masses in annotating media with “semantic” labels. At best, we can get the people to annotate content (such as Flickr images or YouTube videos) with short text descriptions or tags.  

Hmmm, yes, very Aristotelian. I like it. Sounds like Naaman’s actually observed the primates in question. (Down the block from me, one of these primates spray-painted his name on the road with stencil. It’s not a complicated name, a four-letter smacker, spelled J-A-K-C, apparently.)

Naaman modified his original use of the word "dead," as it was intended more as a conversation-starter, opting for something closer to unachievable.

Certainly, Berners-Lee has wowed the world in the past. It wouldn’t be surprising if he heard rhetoric like this before his historic launch of an HTML page. So what does ol’ TBL have to say about it? Let’s check his blog.

He says "blogging is great" … um, at least he thought so last November.  

That’s the traditional way of keeping track of content out there you want to refer to again.

What if you want to share your bookmarks? Not easy with a standard Firefox or IE installation without add-ins or plug-ins. And adding links in two separate browsers is a real pain.

That’s where del.icio.us comes in.

If you’re a del.icio.us and Firefox user, you’ll love what’s new with this social bookmarking service. Take a look at this screenshot of my del.icio.us account page:

Notice the left hand sidebar – your tags and your bookmarks of everything you’ve posted to your del.icio.us account. Similar to Firefox so far (well, except the tags).

Now look at the top of the screenshot and notice some new icons next to the address bar – one marked ‘tag’ and the other the del.icio.us logo – as well as a new del.icio.us toolbar above the Google one.

That’s where this gets really interesting and extremely useful.

The folks at del.icio.us have just made your bookmarking and tagging far more useful by integrating Firefox and del.icio.us through a new plug-in.

So instead of having your Firefox bookmarks and a separate set of sharable bookmarks on del.icio.us, you can combine the two into a single set of bookmarks at del.icio.us which you can choose to share or not. Plus you can access those bookmarks from any computer connected to the net, using any browser.

Of course, you don’t have to integrate your Firefox bookmarks – you can install the plug-in and still keep things separate. I can see where you might want to do this, eg, if you have things like online banking or other sensitive links in your Firefox bookmarks.

The good news is you can be selective re which Firefox bookmarks you integrate with del.icio.us, so removing any concerns about your sensitive links.

Once you have things set up at del.icio.us, you can then manipulate the links and how they’re displayed. Sort in alphabetical order. Sort your tags the same way or entirely differently. Other options to help you efficiently manage your links. You can export them and save a backup file on your computer.

This is a terrific tool! For me, it also means that finally I will get to use del.icio.us far more extensively than I have to date. Be better organized. No more adding to static bookmarks.

If you’re not yet a del.icio.us user, this will surely tempt you and bring you into the world of tagging and sharing the content you find valuable.

Give it a whirl.

[Edit] One thing I didn’t spot until just now – a new menu item in Firefox squeezed between ‘History’ and ‘Bookmarks’ that shows all your del.iciou.us content just like the traditional Firefox bookmarks list, but also with a choice that displays all your content by their tags.

From here, you can also manage your deli.icio.us network, your subscriptions, import bookmarks, and a bunch of other things.

Oh this is so useful!

Comments

The Blogosphere’s Alive, And Turning Japanese

For the past few years, Sifry has regularly addressed the "State of the Blogosphere." After an absence of such reports since October 2006, Sifry emerges from the Technorati mines with a chunkier version he’s calling the "State of the Live Web," detailing especially the explosion of tagging.

"The bottom line: we’re seeing explosive growth in the tags index," said Sifry. "People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages."

Sifry’s full report can be found at his "Sifry Alerts" blog, complete with charts and graphs to satisfy your need for statistical profundity. Technorati is tracking about 230 million tagged posts, which means over a third of posts indexed by the blog search engine use categorical indicators. 

According to the report, Technorati is now tracking 70 million blogs, growing by 120,000 new blogs daily (worldwide), or nearly one and half per second. This is slower than it has been in past years, when the total blogosphere was doubling nearly twice as fast.

Slower doubling is just a normal growing pain, though, as numbers increase; after all it would take longer to make two elephants than two mice, if you’ll forgive the asinine analogy.

But don’t give any credit for growth to splogs (spam blogs), which have also been thriving in recent months, growing like a termite swarm at 3,000 to 7000 new splogs daily. December, when peace and goodwill are transfused with greed and ego-gasmic self-entitlement, splog counts rise to about 11,000 daily.

Sifry says Technorati removed 341,000 splogs from its index in December alone.

One of the more interesting parts of the report is the increased acceptance of blogs as media sources. Just six months previous, only 12 blogs made it into the top 100 Internet sites list. As of April, the number of blogs on the list increased to 22.

"Blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets," he said.

But don’t expect them to all be in English. While 36 percent of all blog post are Anglo-centric, that’s less than before when the International Language enjoyed 39 percent of the conversation. Japanese is now the most-used language of the blogosphere, accounting for 37 percent of all posts, up from 33 percent.

English and Japanese are followed by Chinese and Italian, with Farsi making it into the top ten for the first time.