How and Why to Use TekTag

Thanks to all of you who have given us suggestions and words of encouragement.  I'd like to address one question/comment that comes up quite a bit.  When they first see it, may people aren't sure how to use TekTag, or exactly what it is.  Those who are familiar with social bookmarking usually get it pretty quickly, but I've been surprised at what a relatively small number of people this is.  Just goes to show you that even with millions of people using sites like Digg and del.icio.us, there are still several times that number who have yet to experience it.  Sort of reminds me of those mid-90's conversations: "So I was checking out this site with Netscape yesterday."  "With what?"

But I digress.  Let me explain the raison d'etre for TekTag, and a few ways you might use it.  The idea behind TekTag is to provide a place where users can find useful technical information - or Save, Search and Share, as we now say.  What will make TekTag take off is users like you; people like you will find and save information that you find useful.  So instead of simply using Google to search, you and/or Google will search TekTag, which is target rich and has lots of metadata.  We use social bookmarking as our foundation because it's the right paradigm.

So here's how you might use TekTag:

1) Save your own technical bookmarks - If you are a developer, consultant, IT team member, use TekTag to save links to important bug data, useful tips, security alerts, whatever.  Sure you could use del.icio.us to do it, but you might prefer some of TekTag's specific tech-info-related features.  You can keep them private, or make them public for all to see.

2) Share and send useful bookmarks to others - Maybe you have a group of people - customers, co-workers - that you want to disseminate data to.  A great way to do it is save them on TekTag, then share them with the group.  Right now on TekTag you can e-mail them or have them put you on their watchlist.  Soon you will be able to save bookmarks for an individual and have it show up in their "inbox."

3) Search - You might be looking for something very specific - on Linux, or MySQL, or fill-in-the-blank technology.  With TekTag, not only can you find these types of things in our target rich environment, but you can also look at the ratings and reputations of the people who saved them.

4) Browse - Maybe you just like staying in the loop.  If so, you can subscribe to one of our many RSS feeds and just see what pops up.  The Linux feed, say.  Or the PHP feed.  You can also see what's popular with our "Catch of the Day" feed.

I'm sure there are more uses (and I'd love to hear your ideas), but you get the general idea.  And we have much more planned to TekTag, so stay tuned.

Regards,

TJ