Slashdot Mirror
The Need For A Tagging Standard
John Carmichael writes "Tags are everywhere now. Not just blogs, but famous news sites, corporate press bulletins, forums, and even Slashdot. That's why it's such a shame that they're rendered almost entirely useless by the lack of a tagging standard with which tags from various sites and tag aggregators like Technorati and Del.icio.us can compare and relate tags to one another.
Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the blogosphere — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they're not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it.
I have to say, it would be nice to just learn one way of tagging content and using it everywhere.""
Tags are probably very community based, so they would only make sense within that community. (!itsatrap wouldn't work so well on iloveponies.co.ae). That said, why make tags which are meaningless to other communities or have vastly different meanings to other people available as a sorting or searching option? Sure, you could make some pretty mean stats proving any point you'd like (bad grammar in tags up 14.8% from last year! tag "yes" used in 87% of all blogs, world population feeling positive!) but I don't see the point.
Also, anyone trying to make a serious argument containing the word "blogosphere" should really try and get out more. Come on people, it's not world hunger we're solving here. Viz: http://coolestshop.com/headline-blog.html
Er, guys?
Tags are keywords.
There's a keyword line up in the header that isn't being used for much these days.
If you want to tag your document in a machine-readable way, put the tags in the keyword field. Problem solved.
There are a lot of instances of manual tagging, and I agree with you that they're just too cumbersome (as does almost an entire field of psycholinguists [if you think you can get all of them to agree on anything you're sorely mistaken. They'll disagree just because they can]).
The automatically generated tags are exactly what I was talking about. I didn't get terribly explicit with my ideas, but you seem to be going in the same direction I was. Getting the software to both tag incoming documents and categorize the semantic webs generated by each is the key to some 'universal' tagging sytem. This way we have maximally efficient tags along with a standardized definition for each and (perhaps most importantly) an automatic way of tagging all the documents to be processed. No room for the "13 year old cheerleader tags" as someone so eloquently put before.
We still have the problem of naming the 'generic' tag categories generated by the software... The solution for that one is a lot hazier, though important. I don't think anyone will go looking for 'category 12233242' to find 'academic humor'.
There is a standard but nobody uses it these days. Even the search engines disavow it anymore.
The rel-tag microformat is an attempt to standardise tagging. It relies on other microformats to define what it is you are tagging. There isn't a 'photo' microformat at the moment, so you can't do a web-wide search for photos tagged 'fireworks' for example. If you're interested in the semantic web it's worth checking out microformats. You can download a plugin for firefox that reads microformats. Go and have a look at Flickr with it, or any other site that implements microformats. If people have tagged something with a 'geo' tag giving long. and lat. then it will bring up a Google Map showing the location. If they've included a 'hCard' around their contact details you can add it to your address book.