Slashdot Mirror
Technorati Does Tags
Ian@FalsePositives.com writes "Technorati (a search engine for blogs) has a new 'tag' service. If your blog tool of choice uses Categories, has a RSS/Atom feed, and pings technorati, then you're done. If not, you can add tags via a new tag markup. The twist is that Technorati is working with Del.icio.us (a social/sharing bookmark manager website) and Flickr (a social/sharing photo web site) to read their tagged content! So Flickr pictures, Del.Ico.us bookmarks, and blog posts all on one page! Here's an example result for the tag Toronto. There is some documentation as well. One current limitation is that there is no way to do tag intersection as with del.icio.us (i.e. http://del.icio.us/tag/toronto+food ) like http://www.technorati.com/tag/toronto+Food.
Tagging (also know as Folksonomies) was the topic recently on Slashdot: Folksonomies In Del.icio.us and Flickr."
Wow, one of my articles on my blog made it on the Security tag. Look for "Life of an IT Major".
How does this help with information overload?
Nothing but an individual ranting as if anyone cares. The whole blog circuit is a sea of useless soap boxes. Like this comment.
Through this, del.icio.us, pingback, trackback, and similar things, it's becoming increasingly easy to categorise resources and find other resources on the same topic. Throw in FOAF and RDF descriptions of photographs, and the semantic web is coming together nicely.
Just something to remember the next time somebody tells you that the semantic web is an AI fantasy.
Technorati is one of the coolest companies in the valley (and they're in the city!) I actually interviewed with them for a database position. They have a truly gigantic database server cluster (well, okay, not if you compare to Google, but everyone's small compared to Google) and a very interesting data mining problem.
:)
Right now their search engine is a little rusty, but it won't take much for them to tune this into something very cool.
The first question that I asked them when interviewing was: "Why you instead of Google." Their answer was intriguing.
They are interested in what people are talking about on the internet right now. One thing they noted: Google actually dings you on pagerank if people are linking to you currently. On Technorati's engine, you get extra bonus points if people are linking to you right now.
Also, whereas Google crawls the web every couple of weeks, Technorati crawls the whole blogosphere almost real-time. How they do that is a trick I would probably get sued to tell you, so figure it out yourself.
fifth sigma, inc.
How much does it cost to run one of these story-ads on Slashdot?
I have this problem on several sites with Firefox on Windows XP and SuSE 9.2. On SuSE the only extension installed is FlashBlock, though this problem occurs with no extensions installed as well.
Off topic? Sure, mod me down. But I would like to be pointed in the direction of a solution, if available.
The Ezine Directory
How is this different from a meta tag?
...would be QuackTrack. Based off of the BlogShares index, it's been around for much longer and unlike "Tags", it's index is actually peer-reviewed and moderated.
Even when your blog is boring and the content just recycled stuff - at least you can pollute google and many other services. Great!
...
The new tools from flickr, technocrate and delicious won't help sorting out the 'better' stuff. Still blogs about young fertile women and web design/blogging receive the most 'attention', links etc.
This page http://technorati.com/tag/ hardly contains any relevant information at all..
No matter how many links, words and tags you track - they all won't tell you if an entry is any good, if the content is well researched and well written. Measuring quantity is not always a good way to filter out quality.
It's the end of the internet as we know it and I feel fine.
.)
Back when I worked for ByRegion (the company that owns, amongst other things, http://jukeboxalive.com/) I was put on the design team for a rather ambitious project to design a generic class hierarchy into which all the various parts of a website could be fit. Talking about the whole design would both bore you and take a while, but the goal of cutting down on development time had the side effect of allowing some really powerful aggregation schemes, since the hierarchy was self organizing and indexing. We started to jokingly call it Internet2 (which later became the name of another project . .
This is a realistic version of that dream. It's like google but instead of searching for a specific website or chunk of info, you intentionally seek related but diverging chunks of info.
Higher information density gives me a boner.
I'm pissed. You Minnesotans are a bunch of fucking dicks. Fuck all of you fucking assholes up there. You're colder than your weather. I'm out.
Anyone who doesn't understand the significance of this just hasn't thought hard enough about it yet.
All of these sites are in beta (or alpha) right now and are hard to get your head round if you're not an insider, but what they are doing is genuinely revolutionary. They are turning a certain portion of the internet into a self-organizing topology.
Search engines are essentially perspectives onto the network topology. Google lets you view it from one direction, yahoo from another. Tagging lets you view it from yet another, but blogs+bookmarks+images leverages the whole thing enormously.
This is groundreakingly important stuff.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
real men don't use internet or computers.
Wow, it really does work. I posted something that mentioned the word Toronto, and bam, I'm at the top of a page Slashdot linked to. Yes, it appears this system is kinda open to abuse, and that's what worries me about using systems like Technorati and del.icio.us as some sort of magical community showhome. They're great as personal tools, for organizing my links or looking who's linking to my site.. but for monitoring how communities use things? I'm not so sure on that. del.icio.us is already getting spammed, and I bet Flickr will be covered with spam images on popular tags within time.
I know I'm becoming outdated: I only understand half the terms in that post.
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
I can recommend it but it's latest tools need a little tweaking. The current filters do not decipher quality from quantity.
Isn't this a bit easy to spam? surely spamproofing should be integral in new technologies now if its going to be kept under control?
UK Laptops
If I put these Tags in my page, will it still be W3C compliant? What ever happened to standards. If browsers just rendered only compliant HTML, we wouldn't have to worry about browsers not displaying stuff right, because they would have the simple task of displaying what we told them to, instead of displaying what they thought we wanted them to.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Here the problems I see:
People mislabeling their posts, just for high ratings.
- Why not put your post about your anger towards your mother under "Tsunami" to get more traffic!
- Spammers?
- Multi-posts? I know myself like many don't always create 10,000 posts a day. Just no reason. If I have 1 thing to say about 10 things, I post once with multiple categories...
So that post appears in 10 places?
IMHO it's a great idea, but I think something like slashdot moderation will be needed to keep the polution to a minimum. +1 the good relevent material. -1 the bad stuff.
Actually, I like my massive amounts of information, if it's well-sorted and I can read it.
But this is the first Slashdot article I've seen in about a year that I had to read twice, and I still don't understand wtf they are trying to do, the how or the why, anything.
How, exactly, does such a thing differ from Google?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
instead of using the whole width of my window it's limited to (I guess) 800 pixels. Ew.
At typical screen resolutions (75 to 100 dpi) and typical font sizes (12 to 16 pixels), a 600-pixel-wide column of text is more readable than a 1200-pixel-wide column of text, as your eyes don't have as much jarring work to do at line breaks. There's a reason that newspapers print articles in multiple columns rather than one huge column across the page.
Today's browsers do wierd things sometimes. Its call ed Quirks Mode. Quirks Mode is when the browser assumes responsibility for what HTML does and doesn't rely on a DTD.
If you supply a proper DTD to a standard spec like HTML 4.01 Strict, and then use improper HTML (like these tags) inside your site, the browser will rush into quirks mode again, potentially ruining your site.
What they should've done instead was use meta tags and throw in some custom headers. This would've a lot smarter.
OK, another aggregator which slaps a bunch of tangentially related stuff together with little sense or meaning or rhyme. No context, no insight, no story. Just a bunch of semi-relevant flotsam with about as much vividness as a fake tit. No thanks.
So, I go to their tags/ page. And I see:
Tags: The real-time web, organized by you
Followed by a hundred or so randomly shuffled, randomly sized, very generic words. First off, my organizational skills obviously SUCK. So, I randomly click on "Culture", and get articles like:
- More Positive Articles on Bishop Olmsted
- Coming next: The Mongolian-American Curling Club
- It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, (iPod) World
OK, so, yes, I'm an old fogey. This seems really neat in an engineering this-doesn't-really-mean-anything sense, but going by the comments, I feel let-down. This is finding that, gosh, the trees all look the same. But it's still not giving me any handle on the size of the forest, or my position within it.
-scott
It's sad that the anti-intellectual bias on Slashdot seems to be increasing daily.
The concepts here actually aren't particularly abstract. Give Del.icio.us a try - I've found its tagging system to be an incredibly convenient and flexible alternative to hierarchical organisation of information. Technorati just seem to be making use of their concept in their search engine.
Except that it actually makes sense here, because if 60% of the window width is too wide then most likely your window is just too large for most webbrowsing.
Which is the point I was trying to make with you.
layouts that blank out half of the screen real estate they could use suck.
Would you rather have that space filled with blinking advertisements?
You know the nature of most of the major blogging software/services, and how it makes updates to blogs (particularly, how it stamps dates on entries). Then, you cache all of the previous crawls, and check if the blogs have been updated with some kind of multithreaded http client system.
Seeing whether or not the relevant files have been updated is an efficient operation (http protocol allows it). If they have, you parse only the update (entries dated as newer than last update) and add it to the cache. You never need to take in the same information twice. Tracking a page to check whether it is updated consumes few resources if it hasn't been.
Every now and then you throw out parts of the cache that are older than a certain date.
This is just a back of the hand guess, and it seems so trivial that maybe I'm not answering the real question. You might be asking us to figure out how it is you process the information you obtain by crawling the blogs and keep it up to date. That sounds more difficult, but I'd wager it has to do with using the new information gathered to modify the previous rankings rather than trying to to recompute the entire data set with every little update that trickles in.
Either answer doesn't sound all that hard to implement, so I must be missing something.
If they think that six inches (for example) is as wide as is readable, they can simply use { max-width: 6in; }.
I'd love to set max-width: 36em; on a page's text columns, but does Microsoft Internet Explorer support max-width?