Technorati Launches Tags

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Technorati launches Related Tags

Technorati launches Related Tags 04/09/2005 02:47 PM
Ever wanted to see what posts are related to other posts, what tags are related to others? Now you can! Just check under the Tag description on most tag pages, like this one, or this one, and you'll see...

Why Technorati tags don't

Why Technorati tags don't 02/01/2005 09:47 PM
Tagging has become the latest hype word-du-jour, mostly due to services such as del.icio.us, Flickr, and now, Technorati. Clay Shirky and others have written strong statements for this folksonomy phenomenon.

I personally love tags. They are a very cool way of attaching meaning to information - essentially put the semantics in the web in the "Semantic Web" sense, even if the metadata is dissociated from the pages themselves. But as a non-English speaker I see a potentially fatal flaw here: Most Internet users don't speak English as their first language. Even if I speak decent English and use a lot of English services, I still tag things in both English and my native language.

And that means that tags will become "language polluted." Take a look at the Technorati tag for "Macintosh& ;quot;, for example. Many of the blog entries are in Japanese.

If you look at Orkut, many of the parts of it suddenly became &a mp;quot;owned" by Brasilians, which essentially drove away English speakers (I haven't checked how they have handled this). USENET coped with this by having separate hierarchies for each country (so sfnet is all Finnish) and "accepted" languages on each newsgroup. But tags don't have any way to determine the language.

The situation is worse than it should be, because entries on RSS feeds and blogs almost never state what their language is. In fact, I would guess that most RSS feeds claim that the language is "en-US" regardless of their actual content. People like me write in two languages on the same blog. Atom has the possibility of setting the language-per-entry, but I sincerely doubt that anyone will bother to set the language, unless they are relatively passionate about the subject.

There are three cases of "language collision" on tags (I'm using English and Finnish as an example only here).

1. The tag is different in English and in Finnish. For example "fishing" and "kalastus". This should pose no problem, as the folksonomies grow on each of the tags independently.
2. The tag is the same in English and in language Finnish, but the meaning of the tag is different. In this case, the dominant mass of the users will "hijack" the tag.
3. The tag is the same in both languages, but the web pages will be in different languages. This is the case with things like trade marks (Apple, Macintosh, Nokia), or when people like to tag Finnish pages with English tags (like me: I use the word "blog" to mark any significant articles about blogs, regardless of the language). This reduces the usefulness of tags for people who do not understand Finnish.

There is also an additional tagging problem with languages such as Finnish: the same word can be conjugated and written in multiple ways, depending on the context. It is somewhat the same as the problem of using different words for the same concept, but it does make the number of potential strings increase three-fourfold.

There are few solutions to this problem: and probably all of them involve some sort of heuristic to determine the language of the tag and the web page. Tagging is still a relatively new technique to be adopted in mass classification of things, but in order for it to become truly successful, one must still remember localization. Otherwise, it will be the dominance of the masses

...

Technorati, Tags, Semantics

Technorati, Tags, Semantics 06/17/2005 04:38 PM

Hey, the Technorati beta is up. Looks much nicer, though I wish they’d lose the dude with the megaphone; goatees are so 1993. (Hey look, Technorati and Newsweek, sitting in a tree.) Among other things, the technorationals are making a concerted effort to prove that my doubts about tagging are misplaced—so are Shirky et al at You’re It!. It’s become obvious that tags are useful enough as a place to park search words for pictures & music & other stuff that doesn’t have words to search. Furthermore, I’ve heard a dozen compelling stories from people who are using tags to organize their own information and track trends; so it’s looking like the answers are: Yes, tagging is useful; No, it’s not a replacement for full-text search, even partially. On the subject of search, Sun’s Search Guy Steve Green is trying to push over the boundary between search and semantics.

Technorati Tags 101 Screencast

Technorati Tags 101 Screencast 03/14/2005 05:34 PM
We have the best users. I was blown away when I checked my Technorati watchlist this morning to find a screencast done by Alex Barnett, where he explains not only how he uses Technorati and its tags:, but also...

A great introduction to Technorati tags

A great introduction to Technorati tags 03/14/2005 05:34 PM
Wow, now this is what I call some contributed documentation!...

Adding Technorati Tags with MarsEdit

Adding Technorati Tags with MarsEdit 02/01/2005 10:07 PM
Laura Lemay: “As part of this whole tagging experiment I wrote a little applescript for MarsEdit to automatically insert the ‘Technorati Tags’ HTML at the bottom of each post... After installing it, you use it by tagging your post and then just choosing the script from the Script menu.”

Technorati bl0gging tags: Good idea,
terrible implementation

Technorati bl0gging tags: Good idea,
terrible implementation 03/19/2005 03:09 AM
Here’s an idea: what if when I wrote weblog entries about General Motors, I included a special tag, a keyword tag, that let everyone who wanted to read blog entries about General Motors read my weblog article, without otherwise having to subscribe to my blog? Makes sense. Now, should it be “gm” or “GM” or “generalmotors” or “general motors” or “General Motors” or “GM Corporation” or … ? Therein lies the fundamental problem with Technorati…

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Technorati Live 8 launches

Technorati Live 8 launches 06/24/2005 09:59 PM

We just launched the Technorati Live 8 site.

Technorati Live 8

Technorati has teamed up with Live 8 to bring you the latest conversations about the campaign to Make Poverty History. Read first hand accounts of the concerts and events, and get all the news and opinion from the blogosphere.

We've also put together some resources to help you find your way around Live 8 and the blog world:

What is Live 8? Which organisations are behind Live 8?

Are you new to blogging? Find out what it's all about.

Get a Live 8 badge for your blog.

Join in the conversation and find out how to make your posts show up on Technorati.

Do more than just blog - contact the G8 leaders.

The posts listed on the Technorati Live 8 site have been written by bloggers worldwide and appear in real time from Technorati's index of 1.1 million blogs. Find out more about Technorati.

Joe Trippi called us about two weeks ago with this idea. Thanks to a guest appearance of Suw Charman as the producer of the site and extra hard work by the Technorati team, we were able to get this site out in time.

This is such a good opportunity for nations like the United States and Japan to helped their damaged images and also show their solidarity to a cause that they shouldn't have to think twice about. I'm amazed at how poor the response of some of the developed nations has been to this call. Hopefully this concert and the voice of the blogs will help get their attention.

Technorati Tags: live8

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New Technorati beta launches

New Technorati beta launches 04/09/2004 04:12 PM

I'm proud to announce the new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com. Some highlights of the new design:

1. Three free email or RSS watchlists for individuals - all you have to do is sign up as a member. Of course, people who have paid for watchlists are grandfathered in as well.


2. Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize the language as well - using words like "conversations" and "references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more improvements we can make. Help us.


3. Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS feeds.


4. Better explanations and interfaces for Current Events and NewsTalk (formerly called Breaking News). Click on the arrows to expand or compress blogger commentary, to allow a "quick view" or a more context-rich, deeper view into the data.


5. BookTalk (formerly called Hot Products), a listing of the most talked-about books, DVDs, and other products in the blogosphere in the last 24 hours.


6. Improved features for weblog authors: First, a more robust, reliable "Claim Your Blog" codebase. Once you, as an author, have claimed your weblog, you get a bunch of new features, including the blog rank for your blog. (Find out how far off of the top 100 you are...) We're also working on a number of other "Author Dashboard" type features coming soon.


7. Caching, speedups, and bug fixes. Almost too many to mention.

A few points to note:

1. Response time of the searches is still not reliably fast enough. Some searches are fast, some take a long time. We know this is unacceptable, and we are working on this. Site reliability and faster response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve the user experience.


2. We're working on providing RSS and email watchlists for keyword searches as well, but it wasn't ready for the cut, so it'll go out as soon as it is ready, which should be quite soon. In the meantime, you can do keyword searches on the site, but can't get RSS or email subscriptions yet.

Send us feedback! Use feedback@technorati.com to send feedback to the Technorati team, or send comments directly to me at david-blog@sifry.com. Your thoughts and comments are extremely important to us.

Thanks again for all your support.

ProNet: Technorati Beta Launches

ProNet: Technorati Beta Launches 06/17/2005 02:06 PM
The team at Technorati just announced the launch of their new beta site, which collects much of the features and functionality that have been available on the popular blog-tracking service and wraps them in a friendly and fun interface. In...

Wists new features - exploiting tags to
improve a search engine - global search
over users, tags and items

Wists new features - exploiting tags to
improve a search engine - global search
over users, tags and items 03/14/2005 04:33 PM
We've added a global search feature to Wists. The search will look up users, tags and individual item titles and...

Mac tags

Mac tags 03/29/2005 05:06 PM
Why is it that it seems many more Mac owners decorate their laptops with stickers than do PC notebook owners? Maybe it's because we PC owners want to be able to re-sell our notebooks while Mac owners assume they're going to own their machines till they wear them down to the rims. [Technorati tag: macintosh]...

Hot Tags

Hot Tags 03/26/2005 07:40 PM
Neat index on Flickr... In the last 24 hours hail, tourists, rodeo, semanasanta, goodfriday, watercolor buddies, fullmoon, lamb, luna, gravestone, diptych, stlouis, easter, uae, toddler, luke, religious, nikon, friday Over the last week dilomar05, holi, pcforum, sexyblogger, goodfriday, dilo purim,...

Look Ma, No Tags

Look Ma, No Tags 07/24/2002 06:29 PM
XML's success can be measured not only in terms of deployment, but also in terms of inspiring competitors. Kendall Clark examines one such tagless competitor, YAML.

This title has no H3 tags!

This title has no H3 tags! 03/13/2003 10:25 AM
In response to several requests, I spent quite a bit of time yesterday reworking the CSS for my site, so...

Tags and searching

Tags and searching 03/31/2005 09:37 AM
Having now looked at the way people are using tags on wists, it seems like the most useful way to...

SWAN Tags

SWAN Tags 02/01/2005 10:09 PM

This afternoon I did a presentation about information shifting at the Downers Grove Public Library for their staff in-service day. I modified it to include more about online social networks since I’ve been drawn to the topic lately. In the section on “library web services” and user-centered vocabulary, I showed the progression from Flickr tags to Books We Like tags to SWAN tags. I wanted to really drive the point home, so I did a mock-up (click on it for a larger version).

Try to spot that word that freaks out librarians. I think we can figure out a way to handle all of this, though. Wouldn’t it be a cool way to browse the catalog?!

Tangent: After the presentation, a staff member came up to tell me that her daughter got a Zipit for Christmas. The woman had been nodding yes throughout my presentation.

A Democracy of Tags

A Democracy of Tags 06/05/2005 11:27 PM
Peeter Marvet made a 10 minute screencast in English that provides a tour of Estonian e-government sites, explains where tagging to provide feedback to elected officials could fit in and asks you to provide feedback on the concept. Watch...

What's in the Box? Radio Tags Know That,
and More

What's in the Box? Radio Tags Know That,
and More 09/26/2004 09:00 PM
I.B.M. plans to invest $250 million over the next five years and employ 1,000 people in a new business unit to support products and services related to sensor networks.

Tags and Divergence

Tags and Divergence 03/23/2005 02:32 AM

I've been looking at the way people using tags (not XML tags but associating words to lumps of text or pictures) and, so far, concluded that some form of focusing mechanism needs to be introduced to limit divergence of tags which leads to the Tower of Babel.

I think one of the weak areas is exposure.  Lacking exposure to common tags causes people to invent their own.  But exposures out of context contributes little to convergence preceeding emergence.

Hmm.  I think I'll wait for the flower to bloom in its own time instead of screaming at it.

Tags and Stickers

Tags and Stickers 06/05/2005 10:49 PM

As I noted before in Tags and Divergence and attempted to address in Emulating Errors for Tag Convergence, tagging as practiced today could use more convergence features. While thinking about this and wiki-related problems, I came up with stickers.

I came up with the idea of stickers when I remembered the opening chapter of Snow Crash in which a girl tagged a bad driver's car with a sticker. Stickers on wiki entries? Stickers on Flickr pictures? Stickers on links?

Stickers are like graphical tags that users can attach to text or images. While textual stickers can be applied likes tags are, similar to the way adjectives work, I think graphical stickers offer better user experiences. An open system can allow users to create custom stickers and variations of stickers (like icons with modifier pieces) to help users create a graphical language. Time and effort needed to create new graphical stickers is not a liability but a convergence feature.

I think the best way to use stickers is to combine it with limits in availability and time. So a user gets N number of stickers of various types to start with and will get M more per week or month and each sticker type has specific time limits (meaning they come off after a while).

I am still not done thinking about stickers but I thought it was interesting enough as is.

Still Wondering About Tags

Still Wondering About Tags 04/10/2005 11:36 PM

This whole related-tags thing has been around for a month, but Dave Sifry says it’s official. I went and tried a half-dozen and the results were all over the map. I think I spot a pattern where things that are more or less steady-state are lame (Vancouver, prostitution), while it works well on current events: (Firefox, DeLay, Gomery). Which is intuitively plausible. But my question from last month still stands: Are tags useful? Are there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you want to do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly work better than old-fashioned search? I really want to believe that tagging is big, a game-changer, but the longer I go on asking this question and not getting an answer, the more nervous I get.

Do Tags Work?

Do Tags Work? 03/14/2005 05:56 PM
I was sitting up and got pinged by Dave Sifry about Technorati’s new related-tags feature; Technorati thinks that Baseball is related to Sports, MLB, Football, Basketball, Natural Philosophy (gotta love that), and tickets. Some don’t work that well, but the idea is compelling. I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot, and I have a question: Do tags work? It shouldn’t be too hard to find out...

RFID Tags Don't Work That Well

RFID Tags Don't Work That Well 11/03/2003 12:21 PM
For all the focus on how RFID tags could lead to invasions of privacy or how Wal-Mart is going to use them in all parts of their operation, one thing that many people have apparently overlooked is the fact that the technology still isn't all that reliable. I'm sure it will get better and the problems will get fixed, but this report points out that the technology doesn't work all that well sometimes. Everyone admits that RFID systems are likely to become a big thing, but the timing may not be as fast as has been predicted. In fact, some are wondering if the smaller companies providing RFID technology will be able to stay in business long enough.

FDA endorses ID tags for drugmakers

FDA endorses ID tags for drugmakers 02/18/2004 06:53 PM
CNET Feb 18 2004 11:16PM GMT

Pub/sub, tags, and human filters

Pub/sub, tags, and human filters 08/13/2004 05:44 AM
In 2002, InfoWorld gave a Technology of the Year award to "publish/subscribe" technology. In the wri teup (registration required) I mentioned Kenamea, KnowNow, and the Flash Communications Server. The del.icio.us bookmarking system has some of the pub/sub flavor of those systems, as well as some of the blogging flavor. ...

Tags and Simple Rules

Tags and Simple Rules 06/05/2005 11:27 PM
Paolo Valdemarin, who has been thinking about tagging as long as anyone, is still not a "believer." Upon Technorati's 1 millionth tag, he points to the need for more sharing and gardening tools, but also practices: But look at...

Commentary: Think big on Wal-Mart tags

Commentary: Think big on Wal-Mart tags 11/04/2003 01:24 PM
Wal-Mart suppliers must ask the retailer and themselves some tough questions about their RFID initiatives to reap long-term benefits.

RFID Tags For The Rich

RFID Tags For The Rich 02/12/2004 02:13 PM

Second-generation RFID tags on the way

Second-generation RFID tags on the way 03/23/2005 10:09 AM

Flickr Picture Tags

Flickr Picture Tags 09/02/2004 08:05 AM

Popular Tags on Flickr Photo Sharing: I swear that some of the best photography these days is coming out of amateurs. This page on Flickr displays the keywords that people have assigned to images they've uploaded. The bigger the font size, the more times that keyword has been used.

These are fantastic to browse. I like the Architecture category, with images like this one and this one. You can also view by author if you find someone you like which leads to more pictures on a topic, like more of this old house. Here's some comments from the photographer:

An ancient houst caught between highways 152 and 1 in Watsonville california. I don't know all its history, but I know it once belonged to a japanese family who lost it when they were interred in WWII.

Where are you going to get that kind of story anywhere else? If you want to know what kind of bent a certain photographer has, you can pivot your search to the tags they submit, again with font size indicating most frequent.

It gets better: each keyword and other has an RSS feed (2.0 or Atom). Too cool. I so-o-o-o wish these images were all licensed under Creative Commons.

In a larger sense, I really enjoy loose metadata systems like this where people just self-classify with wild abandon and, due to the massive volume, patterns start to develop. Self-classification with no central oversight and monitoring doesn't always work well, especially when the content domain is small, but Flickr has really nailed it.

In the interest of proper attributation, I think I originally saw this in Boing Boing a couple weeks ago, but I'm not sure. I've been playing with it for a while now.

Finally, if anyone has a Flickr account, please post a link to this entry as a comment to one of the photos. I'd like the photographer to know how much I appreciate his work (I mean, geez, look at this one...), but I really don't want to sign up for yet another account with yet another site. He has a site, but no email address that I could find.

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CSS Tip: Customize Your HTML Tags

CSS Tip: Customize Your HTML Tags 11/30/2002 12:30 AM
Net Mechanic Nov 29 2002 11:13PM ET

RFID tags not ready to Spy on You!

RFID tags not ready to Spy on You! 05/09/2004 05:09 PM
Seems Walmart is having problems reading some pallets of merchandise and the RFID tags contained within or on. They have...

RFID tags: The people say no

RFID tags: The people say no 09/07/2004 06:38 AM
The issue has united readers of all stripes, from the religious to privacy advocates, CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos writes.

FCC Certifies UWB Positioning Tags

FCC Certifies UWB Positioning Tags 12/19/2004 03:02 PM

Cool stuff with tags

Cool stuff with tags 02/01/2005 09:09 PM
Check the tag "10placesofmycity" at Technorati. People from around the world are tagging URLS, posts and photos showing off where they live. Technorati is automatically assembling them into a mini city pride portal. Cool! [Technorati tag: taxonomy] [Disclosure: I'm on technorati's board of advisors.]...

HTML Tags Optimization

HTML Tags Optimization 07/09/2002 08:31 PM
Search Engine Optimization Jul 9 2002 6:05PM ET

Technorati will be at the RNC

Technorati will be at the RNC 08/27/2004 07:02 PM

CNN has invited Technorati back to provide real time analysis of bloggers blogging about the Republican National Convention. Thanks CNN! More on Sifry's Alerts.

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Technorati β

Technorati β 01/22/2004 03:04 AM
Check out the Technorati Beta; several days each week I think Technorati is at The White-Hot Center Of It All, but that rests on the assumption that blogs are meaningful or even (dare I say the word) important. And I just don’t know; I’m too close to the problem. But I sure go there a lot.
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Technorati Launches Tags

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