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January 17, 2005
Technorati launches "tags" but makes them more complicated than they have to
Dave sent a mail announcing Technorati Tags today. Here is their help page. Technorati: Using Technorati Tags. It sounds like a good idea to have users set their own metadata tags and let the server worry about normalization of the database. I have long been against heavilly structured metadata systems that require everyone to use a pre-defined list of tags. Tagging is a pain enough without having to live in someone else's taxonomy. So Self Taging is good. Then apply some server logic to figure out which tags are probably related or "close enough" to allow people to find things even if they aren't tagged explicitly with the right words you are using to search.
The only gripe I have is that the presenation of the idea was overthought and shrouded in a bunch of techno babble. I got the impression from all the various threads that I had to start doing something new, adding a new tag to the HTML of my posts. But after further research, what they are really talking about is sucking up the category tag and allowing users to search on categories. MT already has tags if you are categorizing your posts! So I don't have to do anything new.
Now on the search part that would be cool. What I would like is a javascript that will pull down posts, pictures, etc. not on keywords but on "tags" or "categories". for example. BioDiesel. What if I wanted B100Fuel to have an auto generated list of posts from around the web on biodiesel? But not every relevant post has the word biodiesl in it. It may be just a pointer to something diesel related. Or crop related. Or tax realted? So working at the category level would be good. I will poke around for that. I bet it is out there somewheres.
Posted by Martin at January 17, 2005 2:01 PM
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Comments
My favorite part is the del.icio.us integration. It's great to see Joshua working with other companies. Personally, I think del.icio.us is the most innovative site I've seen in years (it's also what got me into RSS).
Posted by: Toby 
at January 17, 2005 2:30 PM
Almost forgot, you might want to check this out:
http://del.icio.us/tag/biodiesel
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/biodiesel (rss subscription)
Works pretty good, although you should be ready to do a lot of filtering. I subscribe to the ipod, itunes and music tags and feel as if I rarely miss anything "major".
Posted by: Toby at January 17, 2005 2:40 PM
If I could, I would like to suggest Blogdigger. We've been indexing category/subject tags for ~2 years, they are available for search via a subject: prefix. Here's a sample for biodiesel:
http://www.blogdigger.com/search.jsp?q=subject%3Abiodiesel
The nice thing is that you can filter by additional keywords, either within the subject or in the post body. Also, each search is exported as an RSS feed.
Posted by: Greg Gershman at January 17, 2005 4:24 PM
Not exactly automated, but you could self select/cherry pick the best flowing from your tag feeds, add to your del.icio.us list, and pull the list of links into b100fuel with RSS Digest code:
http://www.bigbold.com/rssdigest/index.html
Posted by: Rob Elam at January 18, 2005 7:59 AM
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