Tagging - notes from Paolo and Matt
Matt Mower complains that nothing interesting has happened since 2003, and that there should be a bunch of apps to do interesting things with tagging. He links to Paul Walk: 'Tagging: Are we in the Trough of Disillusionment?'.
(via Marc.)
Notes from me (not going anywhere in particular - just off the top of my head):
- Tags seem to be alive and well within spaces like Flickr and del.icio.us, but not on the aggregate blogosphere. Technorati is trying, but not coping with the scale of things AFAIK.
- I'm sure there's something cool to be done with Flickr's machine tags (see also: machinetags.org and the machinetags.org wiki). Further to the previous note, are people using machine tags on blog posts?
- Back before tagging was popular, I thought of tags (which we called topics) more as channels. The term I believe Seb Paquet used, which became the original codename for the Topic Exchange, is blogchannels. My inspiration was KMPings, now moved to del.icio.us, which does a nice job of distributing tagged links. Are people feeding their whole blogs into del.icio.us in the way that they can with the Topic Exchange or Technorati Tags?
- Installing Scuttle, an open source del.icio.us clone, on your own server gives you a private collection of tagged links.
- There's a bunch of tagging plugins around the place. Someone in New Zealand has quite a popular one for Wordpress. I haven't used any of them, though, so can't say how good they are.