Joho the Blog
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January 14, 2005
Technorati, a site that indexes 4.5 million weblogs, is now enabling us to sort blog posts by tag. This is way way cool. In fact, it marks a next step in the rapid evolution of the tagging economy. [Disclosure: I am on Technorati's Board of Advisors. But I would have been excited about this anyway.] The tags come from three sources. First, if you've uploaded a photo to Flickr and have tagged it (or if one of your pals has tagged it), it will show up under that tag at technorati. Second, if you've bookmarked a page using del.icio.us, it will show up under that tag at technorati. Third, if your blogging software supports categories, your blog posts will show up under the categories you've assigned; categories are now tags in the eyes of Technorati. Even if your blogging software doesn't know from categories, you can still tag a post with, say, "weasels" by inserting into it the following line: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/weasels" rel="tag">Weasly stuff</a> It's easy to imagine this becoming a standard part of the footer of blog entries. Take a look at this page to see how Technorati aggregates all the blogs, flickr photos and del.icio.us bookmarks tagged as "humor." This page shows the top 100 or so (I didn't count) tags in alphabetical order, with font size representing the number of tagged items. This is exciting to me not only because it's useful but because it marks a needed advance in how we get value from tags. Thanks to del.icio.us and then flickr in particular, hundreds of thousands of people have been introduced to bottom-up tagging: Just slap a tag on something and now its value becomes social, not individual. As these tags are added willy-nilly, two issues arise: We want to get more value from them and we want to work out the scaling problems — it's one thing when there are 30 things tagged with "weasels" and another when there are 300,000. A site like technorati, which already gets its value as an aggregator, is in a good position to innovate around both issues. Now for some observations and guesses. First, categories are not tags. I'm guessing that the average number of categories used by any single blogger is in the 3-15 range. Many of us want to keep our categories broad because they are intended to help a reader see all of our posts, and we want to be inclusive rather than fine-grained. If that's the case, then tags commonly used by categories are not going to be very useful when aggregated by Technorati. Actually, they might be useful to researchers but not very useful to casual readers. That's not a criticism; I'm glad Technorati is treating categories as tags. But I suspect that the hand-tagged tags are going to turn out to be more useful because we'll hand-tag them with their aggregation by Technorati in mind. (Bogus Contest: How many hours before some posts a bookmarklet to ease the hand-tagging of multiple tags?) Second, it will be fascinating to watch the social effects as people adjust their tag sets in order to get aggregated either into the most popular tags or to be segmented into smaller groupings. That is, if you want to be found when people are searching for blogs about America, you will learn to tag it with (say) "USA" and not "U.S.A.", "US," or "America." And if you want to have your posts be found by people searching for posts written by members of your Dungeons & Dragon's group, your group will make up a tag that no one else would use. How this sort of stuff occurs at Technorati depends to a large degree — but not entirely — on how Technorati chooses to enhance the system. Little changes will have rippling effects. Third, this represents the externalization of tagging. That is, Technorati is a broker of tags, not a place where you create tags. There are other important functions that could be handled externally, including the creation of thesauruses so that items tagged as "USA" get clustered with ones tagged "America" and "Etats-Unis." The particular apps where you tag stuff can, of course, compile their own thesaursi. And, they're likely to be compiled automatically by noticing the different tags that are applied to the same item. But having a thesaurus compiled from a superset would help smaller-scale apps cluster tagged items well and would provide additional useful information to all clustering apps. Local thesauri are always going to contain the most valuable information, but info from the aggregated thesaurus can also help. But, there will be social effects from having external thesauri. I don't know what those effects will be, but I suspect that they'll be significant since thesauri are about meaning across groups differentiated by meaning. Fourth, why can't I subscribe at Technorati to an RSS feed for a particular tag? [Note: Dave Sifry tells me that RSS and API support are coming soon; they wanted to get the release out faster rather than completer.] Fifth, Yay! This is a big day for tagging. My first technorati tags: Technorati tags taxonomy Posted
by D. Weinberger at January 14, 2005 09:28 AM
TrackBackListed below are links to weblogs that reference The tagging revolution continues...:
» Exciting New Feature! from Liberals Against Terrorism Pardon the navel-gazing and nerdery that follows. Prompted by one of my earliest commenters, fling93, I've set up a , I've set up a [Read More] Tracked on January 14, 2005 12:54 PM
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» On Technorati tags...another folksonomy. from View from the Isle by Larix Consulting Tracked on January 15, 2005 01:04 PM
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Comments
how about technorati tags for "i run this" - what browser, OS etc, attestation. which will allow us to meaure (with a margin of error and spoofery) installed bases of various technologies, rather than using estimates from folks like IDC.
i see this kind of attestation and measurement as something that has huge implications for market research businesses. interesting to see technorati leading rather than google.
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000316.html
Posted by: James Governor | January 14, 2005 11:19 AM
How about tag intersection when searching technorati (or on the RSS feed) as with del.icio.us (i.e. http://del.icio.us/tag/toronto+food )? Something like http://www.technorati.com/tag/toronto+Food.
Posted by: Ian | January 14, 2005 12:55 PM
I can think of two reasons why Technorati tag search is going to burn out quickly, just like last week's taggregator:
1) "The social effects of people adjusting their tags" is indistinguishable from Googlebombing or link farming. These effects will be interesting, until someone figures out that there's money to be made, and then they will be annoying at best, and disruptive at worst.
2) Searching for tags from Del.icio.us and Flickr is pretty limited. Those two sites are the only widespread implementation of tag-based folksonomies around right now, and the objects tagged in each are so different that a search which unifies them is effectively useless. I wrote a few comments on David Smith's site last week talking about this, and Thomas Vander Wal offered some helpful clarifications and responses.
The bottom line for me is that Technorati is trying to universalize a function that is only useful in fairly constrained environments, and they are setting themselves up for serious failure by promising to do real-time search of an exponentially growing web.
Posted by: Michal Migurski | January 14, 2005 01:10 PM
I think your point about "categories are not tags" is interesting. Along these lines, I also wonder if tags are not tags.
In each of Flickr and del.icio.us, there is a specific social context for tagging--each is it's own "society".
Combining them in Technorati is neat, and it creates a new society in which all three are intertwined. (And, I think this makes sense especially considering that many of the biggest fans/users of each site are likewise big fans/users of the other two.)
But, I think it's going to be fascinating to see what kind of opportunism arises out of this mix. In particular, popular tags on photos at Flickr might now become popular tags for blog posts, simply for the sake of popularity (e.g., Google page rank or Technorati authority rank).
As you've said, Flickr and del.icio.us and Technorati feel like "our sites". It's an interesting experiment in which we'll see if their combination also feels like "our site".
Posted by: Jay Fienberg | January 14, 2005 01:25 PM
Did you intentionally link the word "taxonomy" to http://technorati.com/tag/tags or did you mean to point it to http://technorati.com/tag/taxonomy ?
Posted by: Kent | January 14, 2005 04:01 PM
How many hours before some posts a bookmarklet to ease the hand-tagging of multiple tags?
Been done already.
BTW, I landed here after searching the MT tag at Technorati.
Posted by: Carrick | January 14, 2005 05:28 PM
For anyone using Movable Type I've whipped up a simple tutorial on how to generate tags automatically based on keywords in your entry:
Technorati Tags in Movable Type
Posted by: john | January 15, 2005 12:50 AM
I feel that the usefulness of tags is not clear as of now and they are just what David has mentioned them to be: way way cool. I believe that foklsonomy today (just like everything else in the Tech world) is heading towards the peak of Inflated Expectations in Technology Hype Cycle.
The complete response is available here:
http://manasgarg.blogspot.com/2005/01/tagging-blogs-what-for.html
Posted by: Manas Garg | January 16, 2005 10:13 PM
I wrote an article about tagging guidelines (for flickr). Maybe this can be of some interest...
It's here.
Posted by: Michael | March 30, 2005 10:16 AM
Maybe when the tagging stuff is popular, "smart" spammers will learn to tag their products to the most popular terms like blog, wiki, sex... to attract users. If tag is not that successful, it will not happen. If it does, it will definitely happen. Any idea on this?
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Posted by: Anonymous | September 14, 2005 04:27 PM