Technorati Tags 101 Screencast
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Why Technorati tags don't
Why Technorati tags don't
02/01/2005 09:47 PMTagging 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Launches Tags
Technorati Launches Tags
02/01/2005 08:50 PM Tags are a simple, yet powerful, social software innovation. Today
millions of people are freely and openly assigning metadata to content
and conversations. Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that people dislike,
the ease of tagging for personal organization with social...
Technorati, Tags, Semantics
Technorati, Tags, Semantics
06/17/2005 04:38 PMHey, 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.
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!...
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...
Adding Technorati Tags with MarsEdit
Adding Technorati Tags with MarsEdit
02/01/2005 10:07 PMLaura
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 AMHere’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…
Direct and
Related Links for 'Technorati blogging tags: Good idea, terrible
implementation'
Screencast guidelines
Screencast guidelines
01/04/2005 11:35 AM
One of my New Year's resolutions is to produce a number of
screencasts in 2005.
Now that I've begun to develop a sense of how these should go, it
seems like a good time to write down some guidelines for those of you
who will be joining me in these productions. Here are the top three:
..."RSS 101" Screencast with FeedDemon
"RSS 101" Screencast with FeedDemon
03/14/2005 06:24 PMA
lex Barnett has put together an
RSS "how-to" screencast which features FeedDemon. Nice work,
Alex!
del.icio.us: the screencast
del.icio.us: the screencast
03/14/2005 05:45 PM
You had to know this was coming. Today's
five-minu
te screencast is a whirlwind tour of
del.icio.us from my own perspective as a
power user.
...Wists screencast tutorials
Wists screencast tutorials
06/05/2005 10:51 PMHaving finally got to meet my all time favorite tech writer, Jon Udell
at the Syndicate conference last week, I...
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 PMWe've added a global search feature to Wists. The search will look up
users, tags and individual item titles and...
Jon Udells screencast of the life of a
Wikipedia article
Jon Udells screencast of the life of a
Wikipedia article
02/01/2005 08:40 PMThis one seems to be going the rounds on the blogs I read: Heavy metal
umlaut: the movie Its very interesting to see the evolution of this
article through 2 years. To me it shows the power of Wikipedia as...
Hot Tags
Hot Tags
03/26/2005 07:40 PMNeat 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,...
Mac tags
Mac tags
03/29/2005 05:06 PMWhy 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]...
Look Ma, No Tags
Look Ma, No Tags
07/24/2002 06:29 PMXML'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.
Tags and searching
Tags and searching
03/31/2005 09:37 AMHaving now looked at the way people are using tags on wists, it seems
like the most useful way to...
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...
Do Tags Work?
Do Tags Work?
03/14/2005 05:56 PMI 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...
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 PMI.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.
SWAN Tags
SWAN Tags
02/01/2005 10:09 PMThis 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.
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 PMThis 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.
This title has no H3 tags!
This title has no H3 tags!
03/13/2003 10:25 AMIn response to several requests, I spent quite a bit of time yesterday
reworking the CSS for my site, so...
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.
...Cool stuff with tags
Cool stuff with tags
02/01/2005 09:09 PMCheck 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.]...
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...
RFID tags not ready to Spy on You!
RFID tags not ready to Spy on You!
05/09/2004 05:09 PMSeems Walmart is having problems reading some pallets of merchandise
and the RFID tags contained within or on. They have...
FCC Certifies UWB Positioning Tags
FCC Certifies UWB Positioning Tags
12/19/2004 03:02 PMHTML Tags Optimization
HTML Tags Optimization
07/09/2002 08:31 PMSearch Engine Optimization Jul 9 2002 6:05PM ET
FDA endorses ID tags for drugmakers
FDA endorses ID tags for drugmakers
02/18/2004 06:53 PMCNET Feb 18 2004 11:16PM GMT
RFID tags: The people say no
RFID tags: The people say no
09/07/2004 06:38 AMThe issue has united readers of all stripes, from the religious to
privacy advocates, CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos writes.
Flickr Picture Tags
Flickr Picture Tags
09/02/2004 08:05 AMPopular 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.
Click here to comment on this entry
CSS Tip: Customize Your HTML Tags
CSS Tip: Customize Your HTML Tags
11/30/2002 12:30 AMNet Mechanic Nov 29 2002 11:13PM ET
Commentary: Think big on Wal-Mart tags
Commentary: Think big on Wal-Mart tags
11/04/2003 01:24 PMWal-Mart suppliers must ask the retailer and themselves some tough
questions about their RFID initiatives to reap long-term benefits.
Second-generation RFID tags on the way
Second-generation RFID tags on the way
03/23/2005 10:09 AM RFID Tags For The Rich
RFID Tags For The Rich
02/12/2004 02:13 PMRFID Tags Don't Work That Well
RFID Tags Don't Work That Well
11/03/2003 12:21 PMFor 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.
Grok Description matches for Technorati Tags 101 Screencast
GrokA matches for Technorati Tags 101 Screencast
Technorati Tags 101 Screencast
