David Weinberger on Open Tags

David has resurrected the hope for open tags that I wrote about last spring, here, and here . The post led to a long interchange with Drummond Reed. David doesn't seem to be aware of the meme from last year, but almost exactly follows my concerns:

[from Joho the Blog: Open namespaces for tags]

So, what other namespaces are there? I asked Dave Sifry and he suggested Wikipedia as an obvious choice. That would mean that the tags at the end of your article would link to the Wikipedia article by that name. I've done that with the tags for this post, so if you click on the tag "tagging," it takes you to the Wikipedia entry on tagging. Normally, my tags take you to the Technorati page that aggregates other pages tagged with that tag.

E.g., Instead of <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/tagging" rel="tag"> tagging<a> I'm using, <a href="http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/tagging" rel="tag"> tagging</a>

Of course, where there is no Wikipedia entry, e.g., "everything is miscellaneous," you get a broken link.

So, shouldn't there be a non-vendor, open site that can serve as a namespace? But what would that site do with the tags it's aggregating? And what would it take for it to aggregate those tags? Wouldn't it have to have Technorati's infrastructure? In other words, wouldn't you have to rebuild Technorati?

My final solution was to use a local tagspace, supported by the blogging tool, like categories. I also supplied the the idea that whatever tag aggregators (like Technorati) spider a blog and identify the tags, they should acknowledge the use by sending a trackback to the blog post. This avoids the specific and hard-coded nature of the rel="tag" URL, even something as universal as Wikipedia.

tags: open+tags, david+weinberger, tagging, social+tools, technorati, wikipedia

Comments

[David Sifry]

That would make us an awfully huge purveyor of trackback spam...

Dave

[David Weinberger]

My memory is crappy. In fact, I think I may have blogged about this before, too. Don't ever get old and stupid, Stowe.

Meanwhile, Stowe, I see that you're in fact using the technorati namespace for your tags.

[Stowe Boyd]

Dave S - Yes, but in a world with multiple tag aggregators, it would provide a way for readers to move from posts to tagspaces, without them being baked into the tag specification.

David W - Yes, I have opted not to create the ten thousand categories that would like arise if I were to map tags locally onto categories. That is mostly because tag aggregators like Technorati don't follow the open tag model. Although Technorati would handle the open tag URL pointing to category-related tagspaces, they don't support the notion of trackbacks as I outlined, and I would then have to do something manual to have a link created to Technorati's corresponding tagspaces.