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.""
A tagging standard isn't needed. Tags are just keyword that describe something. They're *WORDS* for Christs's sake. Just screen scrape them if you have to. Put them in a database. Read them aloud with a British accent, if you'd like. But if you can't parse plain old words, then I don't think that any kind of "standard" is going to help you.
In the article, this guy is saying that some tags have spaces in them, and some don't, so that makes it hard. How about "where lcase(tags) like '%vista%'? How hard is that?
This guy is an idiot.