New on GovLoop: Drop Downs and Tag Choices in Blogs

Way back in November 2010 (“GovLoop Tags and Feeds Project”), I asked the GovLoop community if anyone would be interested in helping me on a little project – figuring out a way to collect and categorize the tags associated with blogs and forums so that it would be easier to mine the vast treasure trove of insights and information on GovLoop.

What emerged were two datasets of GovLoop tags – one for blogs and another for forums – that have been faithfully updated by Sam Allgood and Stephen Peteritas every week for well over a year. If you’re interested in finding content by categories, those are great and easy-to-use resources.

But we also wanted to make it easier for you to find the blogs and forums that are most important to you right on the site. As Steve Ressler announced back in January, that was one of the big reasons for our creation of the seven GovLoop Communities. You can send your content to those communities by tagging them with acquisition, career, communications, “human resources”, leadership,“project management” and tech.

Well, I’m happy to say that as of today, we’ve taken this whole project one step further by adding two tag-related features for blogs:

1. Easy Tagging: When you add a new blog post, you now have an option to select from a list of popular tags to categorize it and ensure that other interested readers discover it more easily. Of course, you can still use other tags by manually entering them into the box below marked “Tags.”

2. Blog Search Supplement: Want to explore more of the blogs that have been posted on GovLoop around a particular topic? We have added a drop-down right next to the blog search that allows you to quickly identify some of the more popular topics and pull those up for review.

These are kind of geeky, meta-data type changes, but we also think they have practical implications for helping you to more quickly find the resources and insights that will help you do your job better. Very special thanks for Sara Estes Cohen and “TJ” for their help on this project.

Let us know your thoughts.