01.26.06

Rogue Connect Goes Folksonomy Tag Crazy

Posted in Entrepreneurship at 8.46 am by daniel

Folksonomy tagging is almost a buzz-word, an ‘integral’ part of Web 2.0, but it’s something that can only be found on a few of the hottest and most discussed sites of the moment. While Technorati features it, and Flickr depends on it, tagging is yet to become main stream. But don’t let that fool you, tagging is hot and Rogue Connect has recently become one of the few social networking sites to tout it as a main feature.

Over the past few weeks we’ve steadily snuck tagging into Rogue Connect, first implementing it into the fashion blog and later applying it to member profiles. In developing our tagging system we were mindful that they had to be useful. There was no point in putting in tags because we could or because they’re a hot concept right now, we had to implement tags because they would be useful to our members; they had to mean something.

We tried to achieve this is a pretty simple way; categorising the tags. Now I know that part of the appeal of tags is that they’re fluid, but that doesn’t always serve to make them useful. As we’re applying the tags to different content, and intend to allow members to apply them to more areas of the site in future, the separation had to be there. So if you visit the tagging page you’ll notice that for any given tag, sexy for instance, you can choose to view members tagged sexy and fashion entries tagged sexy. These two things are totally different and we’re hoping that the categorisation of the two bring our members something useful, as opposed to just a horde of information that they have to get their heads around. On a side note the ‘just membrs’ and ‘just fashion’ buttons used to display the different tags are our first implementation/experimentation with the AJAX mindset.

About a week ago I made a mention of Rogue Connect’s tagging system and mentioned our members reaction to it; “our logs have showed that the average time on the site has raised considerably in the areas that feature tagging. For instance, members are no longer just reading style entries, they’re now tagging them as well. What was initially a brief perusal of (and sometimes a comment on) a fashion entry has become a quest to tag it.” This is still true. In fact, I’d like to further it by saying that more members are using the tagging feature than the search of browse tools, admittedly though, both of these need a rework to keep up to speed with our changing community.
There has been another great advantage to us; it takes us well away from the online dating space, somewhere we don’t want to be. Sure, people are going to use Rogue Connect to try and find dates (interestingly a lot of the guys who apply for account and state this as their aim don’t end up approved by our members), but that’s not what the site is about. Replacing the search on the main page with ‘fashionising tags’ has really taken us away from the look that’s common to online dating sites such as Match.com and Lavalife.

It also makes us one of the first into the space of a pure social networking with tagging. The only other that springs to mind is Consumating, and they differ as they’re pure online dating and have implemented their tagging system differently.

Like all things on Rogue Connect, the tagging tool is a work in progress. Not because we’re not happy with it, but because there are always things that can be tweaked and improved. But so far, so good!

Permalink