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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."

56 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Security Thread by CypherXero · · Score: 1

    Wow, one of my articles on my blog made it on the Security tag. Look for "Life of an IT Major".

    1. Re:Security Thread by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      LiNK for the lazy.

    2. Re:Security Thread by zudfunck · · Score: 1

      Look at Sampler they are the best Posts!

  2. Who cares about blogs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Nothing but an individual ranting as if anyone cares. The whole blog circuit is a sea of useless soap boxes. Like this comment.

  3. This is what the semantic web is all about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:This is what the semantic web is all about by moonbender · · Score: 1

      Okay, this is really kind of amazing. It's like you have whole websites dedicated to all kinds of various topics created overnight. Complete with news posts, discussion, images and links for more in-depth discussion. Groups of volunteers who don't even necessarily know about another all contribute to these thematic websites (or portals, whatever).

      What's not so amazing? Obviously, quality control and assurance becomes a problem. Maybe they ought to have some moderation or karma system. And gee they really need to fix their layout - instead of using the whole width of my window it's limited to (I guess) 800 pixels. Ew.

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
    2. Re:This is what the semantic web is all about by epeus · · Score: 1

      You might find the stuff Tantek and I have been writing about the 'lowercase semantic web' interesting:
      Real World Semantics
      Can your website be your API?

      These outline the principles behind these new XHTML microformats we are building on at Technorati,

  4. Technorati is News for Nerds by philovivero · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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. :)

    1. Re:Technorati is News for Nerds by RidiculousPie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Google actually dings you on pagerank if people are linking to you currently.

      Isn't this because the distortion of pagerank that dense crosslinking of blogs was creating and thus making it harder to find the information you were looking for?

      I remember doing google searches and finding the first page to be blog results, but I haven't recently had a similar experience.

      Does this make sense, or is my brain not working at half two in the morning?

      --
      ah, mod points ... now where is my crack?
    2. Re:Technorati is News for Nerds by tobes · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm suprised that Google isn't taking some of that sweet IPO cash and buying up all of these companies. I know I find more valuable information from del.icio.us than from Google, and that's simply amazing considering the size difference. I know the scope of their operations is different, but if Google's mission is "to help people find things" (not sure if it is or not), they should consider the folksonomy play.

    3. Re:Technorati is News for Nerds by Rie+Beam · · Score: 1

      "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. :)"

      If I were a wise man, I would think it has something to do with TrackBack...

    4. Re:Technorati is News for Nerds by MooseGuy529 · · Score: 1
      ...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. :)

      Um, don't a lot of these sites get pings from blogging systems? And can't you just run in a large loop checking RSS feeds one at a time (with If-Newer-Then or whatever so it doesn't require a reply unless there's an update)? This doesn't seem that amazing. Besides, the blogosphere is much smaller than the whole web, and easier for tools to parse since there are things like RSS.

      --

      Tired of free iPod sigs? Subscribe to my blacklist

    5. Re:Technorati is News for Nerds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      God... "folksonomies"... I hate this shit. The web is about finding and using information. Not about a bunch of nattering hens prattling on about random bullshit that MUST BE UPDATED IN UBER REAL TIME.

      It's just the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of. Even moreso than "blogs", "livejournals", "delicious", etc...

  5. Was that an advertisement? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    How much does it cost to run one of these story-ads on Slashdot?

  6. Re:Problem with Firefox? by CypherXero · · Score: 1

    Works for me in Firefox 1.0

  7. Meta Tag... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    How is this different from a meta tag?

    1. Re:Meta Tag... by cmowire · · Score: 2, Informative

      RSS and Atom don't have the concept of a meta tag.

      Meta tags are there to hold any type of metainformation (but mostly there for people who view document source ;) ). Tags are one metadata format.

      There's, of course, nothing preventing you from adding tagging as a meta tag.

    2. Re:Meta Tag... by epeus · · Score: 1

      It's different because it is visible as part of the blog post, as an explicit link.

      It's different because it points to something useful (the tag collation page)

      It's different because by sharing terms people come up wiht interesting clusters.

    3. Re:Meta Tag... by MoonBuggy · · Score: 1
      Meta tags are there to hold any type of metainformation (but mostly there for people who view document source ;) )

      Completely off topic, but whenever anybody mentions meta tags I just think of Whois.sc (a great whois site by the way, with which my only affiliation is as a satisfied user) and their 'jedi mind trick' meta tag:
      <meta name="jedi-mind-trick" content="You will bookmark this site and use it a lot.">
    4. Re:Meta Tag... by jasonjacks0n · · Score: 1
      It's different because it points to something useful (the tag collation page)

      It's different because by sharing terms people come up wiht interesting clusters.

      And.. it's *not* different because it will soon be horribly abused by people trying to sell you something rather than fit themselves nicely into categories.

      IMHO, The problem with all such metadata or sematic-web-ish tech is the same: many people will be motivated to circumvent and break the system, rather than fit within it, for a cheap buck or two.

      So, enjoy it while it's still working, before it becomes corrupted and spam-filled.. =)

      --
      This space intentionally left blank.
    5. Re:Meta Tag... by epeus · · Score: 1
      many people will be motivated to circumvent and break the system, rather than fit within it, for a cheap buck or two.

      Yes, but all 3 for these systems offer a degree of verifiability of persistent identity that has a better chance of allowing spam filtering.
  8. Blog-O-Mania by orangeguru · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Blog-O-Mania by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Even when your blog is boring and the content just recycled stuff - at least you can pollute google and many other services.

      You know, when I've searched for something on Google, and the first hit is a blog, instead of whining about it, I've followed the link and found what I was looking for. I'd hardly call that pollution.

      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.

      So in other words we might as well give up on search engines? Fact is, a computer can't tell if something is well written, but the fact that lots of people have decided to link to it might be a bit of an indicator.

  9. This is HOTTT! by erikharrison · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:A better index by Eric+Giguere · · Score: 1

    it's index is actually peer-reviewed and moderated

    Which guarantees that no one will read it. Next thing you know, they'll be charging us for it. That model will never work, trust me.

    Well, maybe if you sell ads or something.

    Eric
    Why Vioxx is like Prozac for laywers
  11. Insanely cool by Deep+Fried+Geekboy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Insanely cool by Moooo+Cow · · Score: 1

      "This is groundreakingly important stuff"
      - Jeff Bezos describes pets.com, circa 1998.

      "This is groundreakingly important stuff"
      - Deep Fried Geekboy describes technorati.com, circa 2005.

      I think they're both equally correct.

      --
      Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
    2. Re:Insanely cool by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      soo.. how is it really different from the category lists that are still on yahoo and some others i think? finding an answer to a problem through them is just as hard.

      reading tagged sites is great, but only if you are looking for random stuff to read about some subject which pretty much means that you're just killing time OR looking for something useless to post on a blog that's already been posted on 100 other blogs.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  12. Here come the nasties? by Peter+Cooper · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Here come the nasties? by Peter+Cooper · · Score: 1

      I just realized I wasn't really clear.

      I can see a not-so-distant future where Web hosting companies are trying to dominate the 'hosting' tag on del.icio.us. Where fashion companies are putting pictures of some model wearing prada on the flickr 'fashion' tag. Where you always see pictures of the new Mercedes Benz on the 'car' tag.

      What will prevent tag based systems getting overridden with commercial concerns like weblog comments have?

    2. Re:Here come the nasties? by isometrick · · Score: 1

      I'm not really sure, but I bet it has something to do with digital signatures.

  13. Yikes by Lu+Xun · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!
    1. Re:Yikes by interiot · · Score: 1

      Well you're in luck! There are tags for tags and technorati/del.icio.us/flickr and Folksonomies to make them easier to learn.

  14. Spam... by mishmash · · Score: 1

    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?

  15. If I put these tags in... by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

    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.
    1. Re:If I put these tags in... by mlk · · Score: 1
      If the blog page is in XHTML, then you can mix other tags in it. But looking over the site:
      If your blog software does not support those things, don't worry, you can still play. To add your post to a Technorati Tag page, all you have to do is "tag" your post by including a special link. Like so:
      <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>
      The [tagname] can be anything, but it should be descriptive. Please only use tags that are relevant to the post. No need to include the brackets.
      --
      Wow, I should not post when knackered.
    2. Re:If I put these tags in... by epeus · · Score: 1

      Yes, it is compliant XHTML - the values for rel are explicitly described to be extensible in the html spec. Check my blog for the exact details.

  16. It's great, but it's bad by digitalgimpus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It's great, but it's bad by epeus · · Score: 1

      Actually, picking a high turnover tag like tsunami will make you show up on the front page for less time than on a more appropriate one.
      Also, with all these services you can't post and run. Flickr and delicious require sign-up; Technorati requires you to have a persistent blog url to tag your posts.

  17. Amen to that. by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
    1. Re:Amen to that. by WaterBreath · · Score: 1
      How, exactly, does such a thing differ from Google?

      It's different in that for Google to find your site, it just has to discover you. But for your site to show up in a tag search, you have to know about it, and alert it to your presence. I don't completely understand the technology of what's going on. But cruising the technoratti site, it becomes clear that your blog has to interact with technoratti's servers.

      As such, it's not all they're claiming it to be. It's a great model for the sites they can convince to participate, but it seems very limited by that. I could see this turning into a very well and usefully connected space on the internet, but it seems there will be a threshhold of how far it can spread because it depends on Technoratti as a backbone.

      I suspect that you'll join me in waiting to get excited until this type of behavior shows up in a more automatic and decentralized form.

    2. Re:Amen to that. by sanityspeech · · Score: 1

      Actually, I like my massive amounts of information, if it's well-sorted and I can read it.

      Point taken. The enlightenment is greatly appreciated.

      Now, could someone explain why on earth I'm marked down as "offtopic" as though I went on some irrelevant tangent?

      Just a thought.

  18. Readability by tepples · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Readability by moonbender · · Score: 1

      Okay, but newspapers don't just print one column and leave the other space white, now do they? Because that's what they're doing, and they're doing it out of laziness and not for the reasons you mention.

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
    2. Re:Readability by tepples · · Score: 1

      Okay, but newspapers don't just print one column and leave the other space white, now do they?

      Neither do web sites, if you un-maximize your browser. Most web sites are designed to fill an 800- to 1024-pixel window.

      Because that's what they're doing, and they're doing it out of laziness and not for the reasons you mention.

      How would you suggest that the sites automatically adapt their stylesheets to anything from 640x480 to 1600x1200? If you were coding CSS for a site, what would you make it do?

    3. Re:Readability by moonbender · · Score: 1

      Most web sites are designed to fill an 800- to 1024-pixel window.

      Most web sites are not designed very well. Which is all right because most web sites aren't visited that often. I'm glad that most web sites I visit regularly (including, oddly, Slashdot) seem to work fine with mostly any resolution.

      How would you suggest that the sites automatically adapt their stylesheets to anything from 640x480 to 1600x1200? If you were coding CSS for a site, what would you make it do?

      Use relative spacing instead of absolute spacing. Or use less custom formatting in the first place. I agree that HTML/CSS2 doesn't really make this as easy as it should be.

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
    4. Re:Readability by tepples · · Score: 1

      Use relative spacing instead of absolute spacing.

      So what if, say, 60% is too wide to read comfortably? And how do you get around the fact that currently popular web browsers scale images using ugly nearest-neighbor resampling?

      Or use less custom formatting in the first place.

      Marketing wants the custom formatting for some amorphous notion of "branding". Web developers merely follow the layouts set by marketing.

    5. Re:Readability by moonbender · · Score: 1

      So what if, say, 60% is too wide to read comfortably?

      I don't think that's really an issue with most web sites - in those rare cases where it is, I'll just use your very own workaround: resize your browser. 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.
      Nevertheless, like I said, the technology people have to use doesn't make it very easy, and in fact this specifically is one of those things I direly miss when using CSS: the ability to use relative spacing but with absolute constraints, that is an easy way to say "this column should be about 60% of the window's width, but at least 100 px and no more than 1000".

      And as you mention, images are another problem for relative layouts. Even better resampling methods won't solve that, most likely nothing will except for vactor graphics. Maybe in the meantime using fewer images is the right way to go. Of course, try telling that to the marketing department, which leads over to the next issue...

      Web developers merely follow the layouts set by marketing.

      Yes, well, whoever is to blame, layouts that blank out half of the screen real estate they could use suck.

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
  19. What-Efff-Urrrr by groomed · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  20. Re:Warning - don't use these tags by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Today's browsers do wierd things sometimes. Its call ed Quirks Mode.

    Browsers do weird things all the time. Some of the weird things are caused by a policy known as "quirks mode".

    Quirks Mode is when the browser assumes responsibility for what HTML does and doesn't rely on a DTD.

    That sentence doesn't even make sense. If I parse it as "what HTML documents...", then it sort-of makes sense, but it's still wrong. A hell of a lot of HTML documents rely on a DTD, for instance if it uses character entities. This has nothing to do with "quirks mode".

    Quirks mode is when a browser intentionally acts out-of-spec becuse it either finds no document type declaration, or it finds one that indicates a fairly old document type.

    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.

    Where do I begin? You're not even close to being right.

    Firstly, HTML 4.01 is not a standard specification. It's a specification published by the W3C, but the W3C are not a standards body. For an example of a standard HTML document type, please look at ISO HTML.

    Secondly, these tags are not markup. The word "tag" is not exclusive to markup, you know. In this case, you can read "tag" as "label".

    Thirdly, even if this was new markup, people would be using element types. Please learn the difference between "tag", "element" and "element type". They are all different concepts, and people very rarely want to actually talk about tags.

    Fourthly, using non-existent element types does not kick a browser back into quirks mode. That is decided by the document type declaration.

    Finally, please refrain from telling people that using something will break their site if you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. Anybody even vaguely familiar with HTML would have understood that they weren't talking about invalid markup provided they bothered to click through and see for themselves. It seems you've made these dire warnings without even looking at the code. Knock it off.

  21. At least it's easy to understand WTF they're doing by shess · · Score: 1

    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

  22. Consider the alternative by tepples · · Score: 1

    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?

    1. Re:Consider the alternative by moonbender · · Score: 1

      Which is the point I was trying to make with you.

      That's dynamite. Except that 60% of my window isn't too wide, my window isn't too large, and they wasted a large part of it they could have used, and that's bad or at least lazy design. Which was the point I was making.

      Would you rather have that space filled with blinking advertisements?

      False Dichotomy.

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
    2. Re:Consider the alternative by tepples · · Score: 1

      Except that 60% of my window isn't too wide

      How would they know that before you retrieve the page? Do you expect them to sniff your browser window size when you pull a page, in order to dynamically serve optimal CSS for 800x600 vs. 1600x1200 pixel monitors?

      [White space vs. ads is a] False Dichotomy.

      When you allege false dichotomy, then you allege that there is a third position. What would you suggest to put in that space that marketing would agree with?

    3. Re:Consider the alternative by moonbender · · Score: 1

      How would they know that before you retrieve the page?

      We're going in circles here; I already answered that. In my opinion the situation isn't ideal, but considering what's possible I'd (much!) rather err on the side of using a relative layout and having lines that are too long. I don't think I'm taking a minority position.

      What would you suggest to put in that space that marketing would agree with?

      I really don't care what marketing says, or whatever is involved in the internal decision process. If marketing leads to people designing bad web sites, that sucks, but that doesn't stop the web sites from being badly designed.

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
  23. The 90% monopoly by tepples · · Score: 1

    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?