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On Technorati Tags
While everybody else is blogging about Google’s newest rel="nofollow" spam prevention shitbit, I’d like to talk to you about that other relatively new thing on the web: Technorati Tags.
Inspired by the tagging system Flickr and del.icio.us are using, the Technorati team came up with the idea of having the same taggability for weblogs.
If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom, just use the included category system, make sure you’re publishing RSS/Atom, and we’ll automatically include your posts! Your categories will be read as tags.
— Source
That sounds neat.
After Technorati successfully spidered the tagged post(s), these will be linked to from a special page. For example, the Technorati Tag Page for stuff tagged with “iPod” displays some iPod photos pictures from Flickr, cool iPod links from del.icio.us and some from furl as well, plus Technorati’s home-spidered blog posts. In other words, every single Technorati Tag Page makes a great starting point for more information on a specific subject.
At least, it would. For now, not that many blog posts are tagged and indexed by Technorati yet. However, that might be changing real soon, since most popular blogging tools (Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, etc) are tag-ready.
There’s one thing that really bugs me about all this: a tag is much more precise than a category. There is no denying that. Take this richly tagged photo of the Star Wars cast, for example. It has a lot of tags, I’m not even counting them. Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with applying that many tags to a photo. In fact, I can imagine people wanting to search for C3P0 on Flickr.
Now, imagine that photo was a blog post you made. Would you create all those new categories, just to apply them to this one post, so it could be spidered by Technorati? I think not! A post which is filed under more than five categories won’t work. Tags are rather keywords than categories. Categories are rather categories than keywords. It’s that simple.
You could argue that extra tags (in addition to the post’s categories, that is) can easily be added to a post by placing funky shit like <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>, but really, how would that look? You simply can’t bug your visitors with stuff like that.
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- Twan van Elk: Folksonomies en Technorati Tags:
Folksonomies en Technorati Tags
Mathias Bynens laat in “On Technorati Tags” zijn licht schijnen over de Technorati-tags: gecategoriseerde blogpostings kunnen bij gebruik van RSS/Atom op een Technorati Tag Page over een speciaal onderwerp bijeengebracht worden. […]- Trackback made on January 23rd, 2005 @ 8:45 pm
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- Preoccupations: Three things I'd like to see:
Three things I’d like to see
[…] ’And another thing’ — taxi-driver mode. A thorough reform ofcategories
in TypePad. Adding tags to a posting à la Technorati method is not effortless and categories themselves are too broad to be very useful as tags. People have been […]- Trackback made on August 7th, 2005 @ 8:03 pm
I’m thinking of doing a taggy thing of my own as well but where, how and mostly why. Tagging seems to be a good way to get people to put in descriptions. How does this tag thing work on Flickr?
I’ll try to explain that below, but really, you’ve got to check it out for yourself.
When you upload a photo to Flickr, you can choose to add a description and a caption for it. In addition, you can add keywords to the photo as well: tags. Basically, it’s just an input field wherein you type all keywords that come to mind, separated by spaces.
But that’s not it! Registered users can also add tags to your photos! Ain’t that cool? If you’re too lazy to do it yourself, have your fanbase doing it!
Hmmm… But what if somebody tries to sabotage your photo with bad tags?
What would the point in that? Besides, it’s easy to remove faulty tags…
The problem with these tagging systems is they will irremediably get spammed to a point where they become worse than worthless. Moreover, even the people running those folksonomies aren’t working as expected.
Duh… ;) Even the people running them acknowledge that… but you had made the conversion yourself.
Bingo! This is why we implemented tag support as a reflection of keywords, not categories.
I have been trying to make the Technorati tags work on my blog and after doing exactly what they say, they don’t work for me. I am so frustrated and an email to Technorati has not been responded to.