More on Tagging and Blog Search

Last week Fred Wilson had wrote about Posting, Subscribing and Tagging as the essential components of blogging. Tom Evslin was equally insightful posting Blog Changes: Taxonomy and Folksonomy which describes that tagging is all about “finding stuff.”  Michael Parekh followed up with On Why Tagging Is So Frickin’ Hard? which is comprehensive and right on the screws.  Strictly from the perspective of a knowledge worker or researcher, tagging and blog search are practically useless.  Pierre commented on my last post about applying some structured tags and auto-categorization to post to del.icio.us or Technorati.  In theory this could work, if a) everyone would agree on what the structure(s) should be and b) auto-categorization was automatically deployed.  This seems a long way off. 

Two interesting examples:

1)      Search Technorati for “term sheet” (be sure to use quotes) and you get back 427 posts.  Since Brad Feld uses “term sheet” as a tag, his excellent series of posts on term sheets appears on right in the del.icio.us and Furl links.  But I know Fred has had a few posts on terms sheets and these won’t show up until many pages into the Technorati results.  A tag search on Technorati yields 8 results, all but one of the Brad’s.  If you can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.

2)      Search Technorati for “class action” and there are 24,871 posts.  Only 12 posts are tagged “class action”.  If you get more specific and look for Vioxx class action, there are many posts tagged Vioxx, but they’re all blog spam – find a class action lawyer in any state who’s working on Vioxx.

There are many other examples.  At the point, tagging and using blog search is For Blogger Nerds Only.

Comments

[Michael Parekh]

Your point on the limitations of tags on premium content are well taken.

What might be interesting is a quasi-proprietary, and semi-structured approach to tags in a premium content environment that would require general web users to work within the parameters set for these "professional tags".

Library Science graduates of old had to learn the search parameters techniques on hundreds of proprietary databases.

This would be at the other end of the extreme...not as wild and woolly as Technorati, Delicious types of tags, but something a bit more structured.

Just a thought.