SUPER TAGS
Call them Super Tags, Übertags, meta tags, tagging tags, umbrella tags, call them what you will but I WANT THEM!

I did a little search on Technorati, so is it K-12_Online, K-12Online, K12Online, or K12OnlineConference? I haven’t even considered the year yet k12Online06… The fact is that some of these searches are similar, but at the same time some posts are being missed because of the writer’s choice of tags. Also, there are other searches, as explained below, where a combination of very different tags would be beneficial.

In my post about a portal needed to connect classrooms to the world I made up a mock site: Fieldfindr on wikispaces. At this site a field expert who would like to help out in a classroom puts her grade interest as K-12 and makes this a tag. The teacher in the mock-up has a Grade 4 class, and she uses the tag Grade4. In helping the teacher find an expert in a particular field, shouldn’t she be able to search the tag ‘Grade4’ and have the ‘K-12’ tag be part of the search? (I didn’t even consider K12 rather than K-12 or Grade-4 rather than Grade4).

It is time for tags to grow up and be smarter! In my first example, wouldn’t it be great if a conference organizer were able to create a Super Tag that would allow a search of any number of tags to also include the many possible variances? Depending on the site, some of these could be end-user controlled, participant controlled, contributor controlled or organizer controlled, but regardless of who gets to create these Super Tags, they are long overdue!

TAG WEEDERS
Many blog sites don’t have a means to use the ‘and’ boolean in tag searches. I find that the need for this is growing as more and more people use the same tags. A perfect personal example of this is how I narrow a search of my del.icio.us account links. I now have several tags with over 50 links and rather than searching for a link through 50+ sites, I just do a ‘your bookmarks’ search with two tags that I think the link would have. This will usually narrow the search down to 5-15 links. (I can’t show you this here since the ‘your bookmarks’ search can only be done when you are logged into del.icio.us)
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So there you have it, Super Tags and Tag Weeders, two features that I think many bloggers would like to see!

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New voices: Following Miguel and Kelly, I am seeking out 7 new voices in 7 posts, here is #2.
Serendipitous Moments isn’t really an edublog, but the posts that author Subbarman tags with Education are a treasure for educators to read. Enjoy!

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Photos: Tagged gate by Steve Roe on Flickr and Tagged Door by Sam Judson on Flickr