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April 15, 2005

Infoworld goes tagalicious

Matt McAlister explains that the Infoworld.com upgrade isn't merely cosmetic: On the articles pages they've moved from a fixed taxonomy that took them a lot of time to develop to a structured tagging system:

What I like most in this new architecture is that the related links are now driven by del.icio.us. Our edit team is tagging content in del.icio.us. The engineers are pulling down the del.icio.us RSS feeds. And then we create matching logic based on the common tags. We also link back out to del.icio.us pages via the tags for the article on display.

This is a first step with several more ideas for leveraging tags coming soon. We need a more densely tagged data set behind us before some of the other plans can become real. The accuracy of the related links will also be a little shady, I'm sure, until we get more sophisticated with our tagging. But we're all excited about the possibilities for the site now that we have these tags. New ideas seem to crop up daily.

Fascinating. Matt also talks about the intersection of tagging and marketing.

So, see Ephraim Schwarz's article on Oracle and Sybase offering RFID integration. To the right is a "See Also" box that lists the article's tags: Ephraim_Schwartz Oracle_RFID Sybase_RFID. (You can also click on "Complete List of Tags," which takes you to Infoworld's del.icio.us page.) The Oracle_RFID link takes you to the del.icio.us list of pages Infoworld has tagged as "oracle_RFID." It being de.licio.us, that page also shows all the articles every other del.icio.us user has tagged that way. (The fact that zero non-Infoworlders have used that tag to me means that it's a tad overly specific. Why not tag the article "oracle" and "rfid" instead?)

Meanwhile, the first mention of a company or technology in an Infoworld article is followed by three little links, one of which is "articles." It takes you to a list of articles about that company. That list is not coming from del.icio.us and seems (seems!) unrelated to the tagging scheme. I don't know if they're planning to switch over at some point.

I'm also not sure what it means that Infoworld is applying matching logic to del.icio.us feeds. Does that mean they're looking at tags from non-Infoworlders?

In any case, this is exciting because a high-traffic site that lives and dies by content is trusting the looser bonds of tagging to help us explore what's related. And if Infoworld is using del.icio.us to include related links outside of their site — even if they don't, because Infoworld is using del.icio.us we can do that for ourselves — then we have a great example of the social power of links: They owners of the information no longer are the sole proprietors of the organization of that information. [Technorati tags: tags infoworld folksonomy]

Posted by D. Weinberger at April 15, 2005 09:34 AM


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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Infoworld goes tagalicious:

» How to combine both freeform and structured tags from Matt McAlister
Today we launched a new design for the article pages on InfoWorld.com.  We are going through the site section by section and making upgrades based on the .  We are going through the site section by section and making upgrades based on the [Read More]

Tracked on April 15, 2005 10:56 AM

» How to combine both freeform and structured tags from Matt McAlister
Today we launched a new design for the article pages on InfoWorld.com.  We are going through the site section by section and making upgrades based on the .  We are going through the site section by section and making upgrades based on the [Read More]

Tracked on April 15, 2005 10:57 AM

» Infoworld goes tagalicious from netbib weblog
David Weinberger berichtet über ein sehr interessantes Experiment, das heute vom Magazin InfoWorld begonnen wurde: Statt der alten Themenhierarchie werden die Artikel nun von InfoWorlds del.icio.us-Account aus getaggt. Damit gibt ein angesehenes, p... [Read More]

Tracked on April 15, 2005 04:27 PM

» Tagging alone is not a panacea for retrieval! from Library clips
A great post on the future capabilities of tags and the idea of the semantic web. I like this part on the fine line between blogs and bookmarking when it comes to traditional link blogging…from the post: “…looks like the there is a... [Read More]

Tracked on April 18, 2005 10:36 PM

» Web 2.0: Bottom-up and Self-Organizing from Johnnie Manzari
When I was working on the first release of Photoshop Album, one of the biggest areas of contention was around tags. It was clear that there was a benefit to building an organizational model around tags, but it was unclear... [Read More]

Tracked on April 19, 2005 12:25 AM

Comments

You know. About a month ago I coded tags into my home rolled blog software. I was thinking I could use them to replace having categories.

What I'm finding though is that I'm unable to suppress the urge to tag each post as a tag related to specifically what the post is about. So I have an ever growing number of tags instead of a fixed set of categories.

Im not really sure where its going, but its been interesting experiment so far.

Posted by: Pat Rock | April 15, 2005 03:32 PM


"I'm also not sure what it means that Infoworld is applying matching logic to del.icio.us feeds. Does that mean they're looking at tags from non-Infoworlders?"

Yes. It is the related discovery of information that is so cool. We offer a service - Ideascape - to businesses that does the same thing as autolink but we use del.icio.us to match text instead of a search engine.

Just as cool, we provide users with an internal tagging system, same as del.icio.us, to give them the ability to tag and bookmark each other's posts. This is great for a KM system or a gigantic learning and development environment.

So far, our experience (the last 10 months) with tagging is that you need a controlled vocabulary to quickly find stuff and a folksonomy to discover related content. The related content is the most exciting since users can add their own meaning via tags, bookmarks to create a rich-context of the content. Hey, we don't all think alike.

Posted by: jim wilde | April 15, 2005 06:27 PM


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