After completing the Tag and Ping e-book by Sean Hu,

I have some most useful insights about it.

Special thanks to Jason K for inspiring some excellent ideas on how to use it!

Final conclusion:

Will Tag and Ping last? Will is survive the rush of new people destined to spam the crap out of the social bookmarking networks?

I don't think ALL of Tag and Ping methods will survive past September 2006.

Not in the way Sean Hu is selling it, with mass (single user) social bookmarking hub pages. Delicious.com is probably reading Sean's e-book as we speak. All they have to do is make it more difficult to get a delicious account and start checking IP addresses. Sure, it is always possible to fool the system . . . but why bother. There are easier ways to use social bookmarking to gain massive traffic.

But Recommending your own websites with 40-100 fake social bookmarking accounts?

The whole purpose of social bookmarking is defeated by such a strategy (although I thought about doing it anyway just for fun in order to check it out.) The "white hat" angel on my right should was arguing with the "black hat" devil on my left. The conversation was very short. "Don't bother" -both of them agreed.

What I DO like is the idea of creating a software to locate under-optimized hubs (untagged) and begin to promote them across your network until the hub itself becomes popular.

By hub I mean http://www.technorati.com/blogs/[keyword]

Using the technorati/tags/ function (and similar pages on other types of directories) it would be possible to create a "hub mining" software based on keyword. I would like to do this in Theme Zoom to give the user a keyword alert called "tag and ping" . . .

One feature Jason K of “portal feeder” suggested is make sure to allow the user to set the "time since last post" when mining for technorati “hub” pages.

This would allow a user to disregard "hubs" with high pageranks if the last post was too recently. It is a bit more difficult to use these pages as back-links when recent posts are scrolling your post off the page every 2 hours. What you want is a “hub” page that is highly ranked and that few people are posting about- or are tagged for.

I would prefer that to be a manual setting . . . the user decides what qualifies as “recent” and what does not. For example, I would STILL want to be informed of high ranking “hubs” even if the post was 3 hours ago . . . for my own reasons.

Pretty easy code to write for this little “hub” miner- heh?

If anyone has already written this - let us know!

- Russell

608-432-1387