Agnostic tags

Agnostic tags

July 25, 2005
Stowe Boyd, Corante, talks about "Open Tags: Made For A Distributed World". Stowe uses technorati's closed microformat "rel=tag" as an example and also talks about the limitations of using moveable type. Specifically, about having to collapse categories and tags and sacrificing the ability of finding posts on his site once they are formatted for technorati.

Open tags vs. closed tags. 

  1. First, let me make it clear that what he is talking about are limitations with moveable type's software. We don't have that problem since Ideascape's tagging functions can be pointed at many third party services for indexing purposes as well as serving as a way for users to find content within Ideascape.
  2. Second, I know Stowe's pain over technorati, since we had to work through the technorati problem last year. Our conclusion was and still is that there are and will be many open third-party services to ping with new posts. We started out using one of the ideas Stowe suggested, having a separate line of technorati tags and another one for internal tags and all the other blog tracking engines. We support open formats and leave it to the user, one click, to decide which services to ping and which services to find and discover those AHA conversations.
  3. Third, we already support rss feeds for tags, catergories, groups, blogs, etc.
Finally, as a small biz, lol, we get little respect.  Trying to make headway into larger orgs, our story about Ideascape often gets very little attention since what we propose is too way out for most orgs to grasp in a short time. So, to have well-known bloggers such as Stowe and Dave Weinberger hashing out the issues that are just now starting to bubble up for them means we are on the right track.

The bottom line is that we are out front on the whole tagging craze and continue to experiment with filtering techniques. Here are examples of what we support today:

http://www.advancinginsights.com/ tags/socialsoftware/feed using a rss feed

http://www.advancinginsights.com/ tags/socialsoftware using address bar

or simply click on the tag in the tagcloud or the tag below the post to find internal posts

What's not shown on our site are the join and intersect tags function and the technorati tag line as well as how users can add new tags to an older post without reposting. If you clicked on the 'blog tracking engines' link above and read Rick's post about the other third party services, the technorati closed tag format is becoming moot and of little consequence. Besides, we have an internal bookingmarking/tagging system similar to delicious for users to tag and retag, both internal and external objects as well as several hooks into delicious to get filtered content on specific tags.

I say forget about closed tags, there are too many other services popping up as well as traditional search, google, yahoo, that are jumping on the tag craze. I'm really diggin what Mark Cubin, "Blog Search for Business" is doing with icerocket.

 

Mark, The value of being able to find this kind of information in almost realtime is priceless.

The abillity to track an unlimited number of searches by having it show up in my reader on any device i have with me makes my life a lot easier and my job a little simpler.

Being able to respond quickly to an upset customer is the easiest way to lock in a customer for life.

Of course beyond business applications, there are great research and personal use applications.

Ideascape has all of the same internal search/tag/rss functions and more offered in the external engines.