Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

"Shouldn't there be a non-vendor, open site that can serve as a namespace?"

No, there shouldn't.

The tags on my site (easily identifiable with the rel="tag" attribute) point to URLs on my own site - so there's always something for the link to point to (and specifically, a list of all links on my site with the same tag).

Them, any number of aggregators can collect the tagged links using whatever filtering method they want. Technorati, for example, could list my posts just as if my posts contained Technorati tags (it doesn't, but it could).

We don't need a centralized aggregator. Just have everyone tag things their own way, and let a thousand interpretations bloom.

For tags to be useful in site organization, you really need to link the tags to your own site. I use a page that lists all entries containing that tag and links to the Delicious, Technorati, and Flickr streams for that tag.

See http://www.kalsey.com/tag/tagyu for an example.

Even "non-vendor, open site" can change, though. Look at what happened to CDDB...

It would be fantastic to have a standard that delicious, technorati, flickr, etc. all use. And there is a precedent there in the creation of the html spec so it is entirely possible. There just needs to be either enough user momentum to get it going.

We believe in open systems. So all of the examples you mentioned, Technorati supports. We think that using Technorati as a namespace ( http://technorati.com/tag ) provides a benefit to your readers, because they get to pivot on a variety of posts, photos, bookmarks, etc where everything is aggregated. But you can do whatever you want, and as long as you follow the rel-tag microformat, Technorati will index it.

Dave

i'm with stephen. instead of explicitly pointing readers away from your blog, build an associative base of knowledge at home. aggregators -- like technorati -- can then scrape away to their heart's content.

These are great ideas, but I'm using Movable Type. MT enables readers to see all the posts I've given a particular category (e.g. media, but tags serve a different role (at least for me) than do categories. MT has no bulit-in way to let readers see all posts I've tagged a particular way. I could, however, use Technorati for this, so that when a user clicks on the tag "politics," she gets taken to a Technorati page that aggregates all the posts I've tagged that way. E.g., politics. But then I'm relying on technorati again.

Beside, I'd prefer to have my tags link to all the posts tagged that way, rather than pointing only to my posts.

As Dave says, we do support any tagspace, and indeed the rel="tag" microformat was designed that way from the beginning.
Adam, Steven and Sean advocate using their own sites as a tagspace, which is certainly one answer, but is arguably even less open - it is effectively creating a solipsist set of terms.

Hadley, the rel="tag" microformat is the standard you are asking for. It has been adopted by WordPress, LiveJournal, last.fm, ecto, icerocket and many other blogging tools.

A further note. If you want to use Wikipedia as a tagspace, you should use their article pages, not the tags path you have, which has nothing there. Instead of :

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki//tags/taxonomy

use:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/taxonomy

Also, Wikipedia seem to have changed the behaviour of '+' as space on the site, so using:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David+Weinberger

for tags with spaces in no longer resolves to the right page - instead use:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%20Weinberger

david, i'd *really* like to see all of your posts tagged with [X] descriptor *without* leaving your site.

or kevin... if you guys designed a tagspace that onClick featured all of david's posts tagged with [X], neatly presented alongside all other posts tagged with [X], i'd change up my own tagspace scheme to go there as well.

The other option is to not use a namespace, but point to where ever that tag should go, ie a tag of technorati could point to technorati, likewise wikipedia to wikipedia and google to google.

Thanks to Kevin, I've got my "Treo 700p" Wiki tag link going (David, you have to fix yours.):

http://billkosloskymd.typepad.com/wirelessdoc/2006/05/_imaging_servic.html

But, I also created a tag link for Technorati. Is it possible to consolidate these links? I'd prefer to link to both.

Not sure if your readers know that they can also scope a tag search on Technorati to just list posts from a specific blog that are tagged with specific tag.

To view posts tagged "technorati" from David Sifry's blog, http://sifry.com/alerts, you just need to do:

http://technorati.com/tags/technorati?from=sifry.com/alerts

Note the use of the ?from=sifry.com/alerts

I've always wondered why you put tags on your posts--I mean, in what ways are they useful to you personally?

As a reader of your site, I wish they would primarily connect posts only on your own site.

Some of your terms might be common enough that they'd be useful for finding other sites on the same "topic" via an index like Technorati. Some of your terms are obscure / unique / idiosyncratic enough that they'd seem to be only useful for finding other posts on your own site.

The "openness" question is a bit weird in that it's somewhat relative to what you mean by "tags" when you add these terms to your posts. And, you might mean different things with different terms--or want them to work in different ways over time.

Then there are different kinds of openness.

Part of the "openness" of having your tags link to your own site (assuming you can create pages for tags on your own site) is that you are leaving your options open to define your "tag" pages to work in whatever ways are useful to you and your readers--and be open to changing the uses, over time, or across different terms.

When you link to Technorati (or any other site) as your tag destination, you are letting the other sites define the options for how your "tags" work for you and your readers who would click these links. And, categorically, it might not match your definition of "open" to let some other site control what your tags are used for--especially in the case where what they are used for includes directing your readers to paid sponsors and/or favored partner sites.

I think Wikipedia is a desirable link destination for many people because it seems to promise a consistent and non-commerical usage, e.g., tag links point to encyclopedia entries on tag terms, and those entries are reflective of a publicly transparent wiki process, free of advertising, etc.

***

Actually, I think this also suggests the question of: why isn't there a non-vendor, non-commercial, open index of the web (e.g., at least as *open* as DNS)? I don't know if there can be (a definitive and usable) one, and I think the best case is making sure that there are a lot of indepedent indexes--i.e., don't link to / rely on any one index too much, and let your links point directly to a diversity of resources that naturally counteract the re-intermediating effect of index-aggregators.

Kevin Marks, your comment is very helpful and informative for me, thanks.

I understand why it makes sense to have my tags link to an aggregation of all other posts on this site that use that tag (which is currently how I use MT's categories) and why it makes sense to have my tags link to a site like Technorati that usefully aggregates everyone's pages tagged with that tag (as my tags currently do).

Therefore, a solution would be to have my tags link to a page on my site that both lists all my thusly tagged posts and provides a link to the technorati page, the wikipedia page, and the etcetera page.

But how?

1. I can sort of do that by having a tag link to the Technorati page that scopes that tag to my domain. That Technorati page also has a link to the global aggregation of thusly-tagged pages. The only issue is that Technorati owns that page, and I'd like to own it. (I'm delighted to have my page point to the Technorati page.)

2. I could write the code that does this for me, dynamically spinning of a tag page with all the elements I want on it. Except I don't know how to. And it'd be great to have this as an MT plug-in so we can share the joy, but I doubly dont know how to.

I've created a sample of a resolution page here.

I think this all depends on what you're using tags for. And there also seems to be (at least) two oblique arguments going on here. I think the thing about "name spaces" is note entirely useful. A more useful discussion is about some sort of interoperability thing... the other point is one about tag driven on-site navigation.

On the standards side, one of the devs here at headshift wrote a good post about a standard tag query format. I think that's something better to focus on.

On the navigation point, tagging is very context sensitive, throwing it out to the www and some big common tag space would quite possibly lose some of the fine grained sense. Using another tool like technorati does however give you a bunch of benefits that can't be supported locally.

It all depends on what you're using tags for. Like any simple tool they can be used for a bunch of stuff.

I see this process as somewhat inevitable. Centralization of a tag namespace is mostly a function of the newness of tagging, once a larger audience start tagging socially/collaboratively, we're going to need a more extensible architecture.

To go on a tangent, think of a distributed workgroup tagging webpages for a project they're collaborating on. They should be able to tag across services, with open directory services providing gating (so they could tag an item with "foo", not not get every item tagged foo across all directories). We're moving in this direction, but not fast enough.

I don't think replacing a corporate centralized play with a non-corporate centralized play is the answer. This is a system that needs to be distributed, essentially creating a meta-architecture that sits on the web stack. I, too really like Delicious and Technorati, but I worry about the valuable content I create - how it singularly makes these services more valuable, it isn't portable, and it lockes me in. Indeed, there is a need for a solution.

well, if technorati just altered their ui a bit, they could provide the same tagspace results page you created david -- primarily displaying our explicit tag posts, then providing secondary links to other posts (whcih they do already), images (check), social bookmarks (check) and wikipedia articles when available.

but aside from the middle ground discussion, i still like providing myself and my readers a tagcloud. my index of posts tagged with "dumb" or "accountability" or even less modern descriptors, will differ in relative degrees from the next person's mental map. so my cloud and its contents begin to represent an *evolving me* on the fly...

Lots of interesting thoughts there.
Fred, the collation across multiple tagspaces does enable that - new tagspaces can be made that make more sense than the generic Technorati, Flickr or Wikipedia ones for specific uses.

Sean, we already generate per-blog tagclouds:
http://technorati.com/blogs/http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger

David, Squarespace (who I work for) allows you to create categories that are the equivalent of Technorati Tags. Therefore, if you assign a category of "technology" to a post, Technorati will display it under their "technology" tag and yet at the same time, if you click the category on your site, you'll see all of your entries relating to "technology". I'm sure MT has a plug-in for this sort of thing as well. As I noted in another post though, if you type the word technology in your post, more than likely Technorati will find it anyway and list it without you even categorizing it.

Dan's right though, this all depends upon how you use these tags. I pondered this a while back on my site and I realized that people categorize content in two different ways, globally and locally. I myself may categorize an entry under "culture" because the overall post talks about this. Yet in that post I may mention other things like technology, Web 2.0, business, and more. Thus while my local categorization in terms of how this post content relates to me would be tagged as "culture", from a global standpoint, other people may see that post as being tagged as "technology", "Web 2.0", "business", and so on.

The thing is I don't really care about defining these global categories / tags because often systems like Technorati will pick that up on their own anyways. All I care about is how this content relates to me on a local / personal level.

Nollind, this cuts to the heart of David's book, and the tags vs categories mental models. Categories as implemented in blogging tools have tended to drive users into 'one category per post' thinking, especially when they have to invent categories in advance and put posts into them. This imposes a big cognitive load on the user - they have to have a mental model of all possible posts to invent these global categories, whereas with tagging, you do it once you have written the post, and can decide which tags apply to it, a much less exhausting task.
I haven't seen your blogging tool, so I don't know how your implementation fits this.

Maybe I'm weird, but I see categories and tags as different animals altogether. But many (all?) of the plugins available for MT conflate the two and thus make them hard for me to use. I use categories as a simple navigational aid on my blog, never really considering them as tags. I use the keyword field in MT as my tags, but I've yet to find a real use for them, besides the plugin that automagically turns keywords into Technorati links.

Jonathan, I don't know if you're weird, but I agree with you about categories and tags :)

Sounds like a similar conversation to that which is happening in the Semantic Web world: the usefulness (or need) for an "Ontology of Everything" (a centralised vocabulary that everyone can reference, therefore resolving disambiguities such as 'cats' the animals or 'cats' the musical, as the context will be clearly defined by the central source, as Wikipedia does).

As far as I can tell, the core Semantic Web crowd seem to think that it's not needed (and in fact, impossible), but it feels like - if the social barriers to creating such as thing were not too high - it could be incredibly useful.