Global Tag Clouds on WordPress Dot Com Sunday 2006-03-26
In the web 2.0 era tag clouds have become popular as a means of providing a semi semantic web. I say semi semantic, as we have humans rather than machines, making the relevant bridges between islands of information. The tag cloud or tag list is supposed to find connections between articles or posts, witin the same or neighboring domain of interest. Quite a few tagging services gather tags from blogs and web sites, to fasciltate this type of connections, and by visiting or subscribing to a service like Technorati or FeedBurner, you get freshly published information on your pet subjects.
There are some problems with this kind of syndication though. Do you really get relevant information links?
Well, as long as machines dont understand meaning, the only possible way to connect information in a meaningul way, is to use humans. The problem is that all connections that end up in a tag cloud are made blindly. That is, when you tag your article, you don’t know what other articles in cyberspace will get the same tag. Every contributing author adds tags, that he or she thinks are significant for the article or blog post. These tags are then automatically added to one or more centralized tag clouds. Not everyone will have the same idea on how to tag a certain piece of information.
I know this from my own experience. I’m farly good at creating categories for my own projects, but I often stumble when I add information to them. For a long time I had the distinct project types “Java” for Java programming and “XML” for my XML/XSL experiments. They resided in different directories on my hard disk. Then came the “Java and XML, a marriage made in heaven”, and I wrote every tiny XML handling software in Java. Where to place a new project? Is it about Java or about XML? Here tags comes to resque.
Tags are not categories, but have the advantage of connecting information over category boundaries.
That works for me, but how about sharing my tags with the world. First of all I have to specify by adding more tags to my projects, such as “java”, “xml”, “xsl”, “soap”, “web service”, “http”. If this covers my story, anyone searching for a “web service” will get a link from the tag cloud to my story, together with articles on certain wheater services, stock services, mapping services and so forth.
As there is no human supervision of the relevance of the interlinking, I’m sure the signal to noise ration will be very low on this centalized tag clouds. Contributing to this low ratio is the fact that the ranking of tags is based on popularity. Probably the most prominent tags are meaningless and yields the the longest lists of results.
So what’s the alternative?
A Google search does’nt give you the latest and hottest articles at the top, but the relevance of the results are normally high, because the ranking depends on popularity of the sites rather than the search terms ( comparable to tags ).
A search or a tag cloud within a domain/sub domain or directory/category would be more effective than a world popular tags cloud. If you are like Lorelle, read “The Problems With Tags and Tagging“, you don’t want to encourage people to leave your site, by presenting a Technorati or FeedBurner link to a central cloud of which you are part, but rather drill your own site local cloud. If you do this in a clever way, the relevance is inherent, as you have now added the missing survaillanse of interlinking.
Yesterday Doncha in “More WordPress Feeds” at WordPress Planet plugs for the new WordPress Dot Com new global tag cloud.
“When you write a post on WordPress.com it’s categorised in the usual way but it’s also added to a site-wide pool of posts and identified by a global category. Matt’s announcement this morning means that I can track what people are talking about photography, photos, gimp and even wordpress all from the comfort of my aggregator!”
The new cloud in the WordPress.COM sky, was annonced by the “Unlucky in cards” chief developer of WordPress, aka PhotoMatt in “Tag Feeds and Paging” at the companies blog.
( My spell checker died, sorry about that! )
- Posted in : Tech Stuff, Web 2.0, WordPress
- Author : Petit
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