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Technorati Launches Tags

David Sifry, Jan 17, 2005
Commentary by Stephen Downes

There has been a lot of buzz in the last few days about Technorati Tags. Alan Levine offers a summary. More. More. Drawing on similar concepts used by Flickr and del.icio.us, the idea is that you create what amounts to a hidden link in a blog post to point to a Technorati topic: the topics, in turn, are created by users, a type of Folksonomy (if these names and terms are mysteries to you, click on the [Research] link to find more information - my own version of Tags, which I've been using for several years. Ross Mayfield compares tags to wikis and suggests that they represent a form of emergent intelligence.

CRLFCRLF

Tags aren't the answer, though. As Dave Winer asks, why should tags point to Technorati? Why should they point to a service you have to ping before being harvested (Technorati reports that OLDaily hasn't been updated for 469 days). How long will it be before people begin misrepresenting their content using tags? Not long. But even if all this works, take a look at this tag index - the popular tags are uselessly general, while useful tags will never be displayed in such an index. And it 's just not worth the effort (the proof of which is this article, which while it waxes enthusiastic about tags, informs us that dc:creator="self"). Now I believe in folksonomy, the wisdom of crowds, and emergent intelligence - network phenomena generally. What I don't believe in are tags - or more accurately, I believe the tag is in the text and the text gets harvested.

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