Dave’s post today about the state of tagging is further evidence that tagging is taking off. Every day it seems that there’s another system which has implemented a tagging backend or another product that aggregates tags.
One major problem with current blogging systems and is that they don’t support distributed or remote tagging.
This probably sounds more complicated than it needs to be. It’s not difficult to grok.
Right now if you’re using a blogging tool which supports categories or Technorati tags then you’re using a centralized tagging system. The only posts you can tag are your own.
You could of course use Delicious, Furl, Rojo, or another system which supports tagging but these are centralized systems as well. If Delicious goes down (which it did the other day) then you can’t tag articles on the Intraweb.
We can do better!
There’s no reason why I can’t link to a post on an arbitrary weblog (or even something that’s not a weblog) and tag the URL with my keywords.
Ideally I could link to a CNN political story and tag it with my own keywords. Right off the bat I’m sure I could find a dozen stories which I could tag bush, politics, president, republican, or democrat.
I talked to Kevin Marks about this a while back and tried to point out that this was a problem. His response was that Technorati tags were never originally designed to do this. My point being that if this is true then Technorati tags are under specified.
One criticism might be that this could yield to spam. If anyone could simply tag my posts then they could cause damage. This would only be true if the search engine in question wasn’t smart enough to preserve the source. There will always be a source for the tag (my weblog) and a target (your weblog) with a given label (the tag). This data is all we need to build distributed tagging.
I’m going to blog part two tomorrrow which I’ll introduce some straw man implementations to hopefully keep the conversation moving on this topic.
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August 5, 2005 at 2:47 am
Kevin, calling this centralised is a stretch. Tagging your own posts on your own blog is highly decentralised; lots fo ways to take advantage of these, including aggregation liek Technorati do.
Rather than make up straw men out of you head, have a look at hReview and xFolk and see if either can achieve what you want:
http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview
http://microformats.org/wiki/xfolk
August 5, 2005 at 9:45 am
Hey Kevin.
Thanks for the feedback.
I think you’re right about the centralized and distriibuted terms. These tend to be grayscale so might lead to confusion.
It might be better to just call this ‘remote’ tagging but I’m still uncomfortable with that too.
The issue I’m trying to solve is that a tag is just an edge in a graph
source –(tag)–> target
But you can only ever use your OWN blog as the target.
I’d like the spec to be able to use any target.
I’ll take another look at hreview and xfolk.
Thanks.
August 5, 2005 at 10:10 am
Kevin (Burton), please expand your ideas outside the blogosphere. Tags are no limited to blogs. Looking forward to part 2 after you look at xFolk and hReview