Remote Tagging: A Richer Social Model

I was involved in a brief email exchange with Eric Marcoullier of Mybloglog.com about his service, which provides a means to track what hyperlinks people are clicking on in your blog or website. I told him that I seldom look at the reports, and the reason is that I am more interested in why people follow links than what links they follow.

It occured to me that I would really like to steer people to links in a traceable way, one richer with semantics. So I have a humble suggestion for the poor folks at Technorati, whose life I have been making a living hell over the past months.

Here’s my idea: a means to associate tags with URLs, so that I can assert that the destination location in a URL should be tagged, even if those who are managing the destination site/blog don’t use tags. I can do that today with Deli.cio.us, but not within the context of blogging. I am colling this “remote tagging” for want of a better term.

Currently technorati tags are of this form:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tags/whatever” rel=”tag”>Whatever</a>

When you click on the link takes you to the technorati page associated with that tag. But what I would like is another form of url, where you associate a remote destination with one or more tags, and when you link on it, it takes you there, to some blog or other destination, not to technorati.

An example:

“over at <a href=”http://marc.blogs.it/archives/2005/06/stowe_floats_a.html” rel=”tag:socialarchitecture”>Marc’s Voice</a>”

This would have the effect of associating the tag with Marc’s post. Technorati could also keep track of the fact that it was Stowe that associated the tag with Marc’s post, and in which post I did so. Presently, only the author can create Technorati tags for a blog post, unless you use Deli.cio.us (or Furl) bookmarks.

This would turn Technorati tags into a much richer mechanism. The social element would be heightened, because the tag could be used to connect posts. This brings the social element of Deli.cio.us bookmarks into Technorati, but not based on a bookmarking metaphor: it’s threaded into the social medium of blogging.

This would also provide tremendous fodder for analysis of the social networks implicit in links. For example, if I have 10 links to Marc’s Voice, and 7 are tagged “socialarchitecture” and 3 are tagged “deathtopanelsessions”, the nature of our social involvement can be teased out. And likewise, the multifaceted nature of people’s social networks could be directly supported in this way. I could tag all links, including blogroll entries, so that the various overlapping social networks that comprise my world could be evident. This would mean that we could drop efforts like FOAF, and instead simply enrich the blogging activities we already are involved in.

I hope offering this feature to Dave Sifry & Co at Technorati will make up for all the trouble I have been causing, finding various nicks, warts, and bumps in the current Technorati implementation. Of course, free advice has a tendency to be worth what you pay for it.