(2004-01-18) Technorati Tags

Technorati has a new Technorati Tags Folksonomy tag-tracking system which integrates across Del.icio.us, FlickR, some WebLog engines, and SocialText wiki's that use Category tags (though I haven't found any examples of this yet).

Links:

• Dave Sifry: Technorati Launches Tags
• Help page
• Ross Mayfield: technorati_takes_tags_global: The open affordances of tags have led to local/global/local navigation and easy group forming. But the same opennes raises interesting questions about tag spam and the tyranny of the majority.
• Peter Kaminski: Folksonomy Serendipity
• David Weinberger: The tagging revolution continues...
• Ross Mayfield: http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/emergent_intell.html

Hmm, how do public Wiki spaces (including WikiLogs) fit with this model conceptually (note the issues around mapping RecentChanges to an RSS feed)? Could this be a way to move toward InterWiki?

• hmm, I suppose you could tweak your WikiEngine to put a little linked doodad next to every rendered WikiWord linking to the appropriate technorati tag page... their tags are case-insensitive. Hmm, might needs to use Expanding Wiki Words...

Various people note SpamWars abuse potential: people putting "popular" tags on irrelevant articles to trick you into clicking.

• update: not like with Twitter HashTags.

I wonder what the Business Model is here? Is FlickR really going to be happy having photos viewed via Technorati? It's not like there's a lot of other content "around" each photo, though I suppose you can be inspired to view other photos from the same person... and I guess they can see it as promoting their paid accounts (I wonder how many they have?).

Jul'2005: Derek Powazek on How Tags Happened at Technorati

• see also this