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The Internet The Media

Technorati Does Tags 91

Posted by michael from the you're-it dept.
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."
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Technorati Does Tags More

Technorati Does Tags

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

  • Who cares about blogs? (Score:2, Funny)

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

  • This is what the semantic web is all about (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • 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 n

      • 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.

        • 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.

          • 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?

            • 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 a

              • 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.

                • 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 dire

                  • 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?

                    • 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 [c2.com].

                    • 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?

                    • 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 mark

                    • 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?

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

      These outline the principles behind these new XHTML microformats [technorati.com] we are building on at Technorati,

  • Technorati is News for Nerds (Score:5, Interesting)

    by philovivero ( 321158 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @10:11PM (#11370400) Homepage Journal
    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. :)
    • 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?

    • Re:Technorati is News for Nerds (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tobes ( 302057 ) <tobypadilla@gm a i l . c om> on Friday January 14, 2005 @10:27PM (#11370502) Homepage
      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.

      • Re:Technorati is News for Nerds (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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...
    • "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...

    • ...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 sin

  • Was that an advertisement? (Score:1, Funny)

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

  • Meta Tag... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How is this different from a meta tag?

    • Re:Meta Tag... (Score:3, Informative)

      by cmowire ( 254489 )
      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.
    • 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.

      • 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 o

        • 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.

  • Blog-O-Mania (Score:4, Insightful)

    by orangeguru ( 411012 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @10:22PM (#11370465) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Blog-O-Mania (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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 mig

  • This is HOTTT! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by erikharrison ( 633719 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @10:25PM (#11370488)
    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/ [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.
  • 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 f
    • "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.
    • 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.

  • Here come the nasties? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @10:42PM (#11370587) Homepage Journal
    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 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?

  • Yikes (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lu Xun ( 615093 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @10:46PM (#11370606)
    I know I'm becoming outdated: I only understand half the terms in that post.
  • 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.
    • 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

    • 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.

  • It's great, but it's bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @11:05PM (#11370705) Homepage
    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, 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.

  • What-Efff-Urrrr (Score:3, Insightful)

    by groomed ( 202061 ) on Saturday January 15, 2005 @02:31AM (#11371700)
    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

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