TagFetch Tag Search

You have to social bookmark and tag. Why? because its the only way to keep track of thousands of bookmarks and reuse them in a smart way. Searching by tags is another powerful way to get information, probably better than traditional searching because tags are created by users while search indexes are created by programs.

TagFetch, searches the various services that utilize tags, You can filter by rich media, bookmarks, blogs, news and more.

You also need to read Steve Rubel everyday. Why? Because he is one of the most relevantly prolific business blogger on the A-List (IMO). Everybody needs a must read blog list. Your must read blog list should have folks you trust and value. Folks that deliver great ideas and links often. Steve blogs about new media, PR, advertising and technology. What makes Steve's stuff different is that unlike many A-Listers, he doesn't focus on scoops or new things, he focuses on things you can use. Things that are not only interesting but practical and useful. That means everyday I find something on his blog that I can use in real life. Visit Steve Rubel's  and you'll see what am talking about. Look at the archives and links lists too. I bet you will be there longer than you planned. I am not sure how great the A-List is but I know that Steve is must read for everyone in business and technology.

TagFetch, which searches the various services that utilize tags, has relaunched with a new design that looks a lot like a start page. The site is incredibly handy. You can filter by rich media, bookmarks, blogs, news and more. We need more services like these that glue stuff together. For a sampling, check out this TagFetch page for the "public relations" tag.

 

Source: TagFetch Tag Search Engine Revamps
Originally published on 8/29/2006 9:08:32 AM by Steve Rubel

Del.icio.us Gets Ads

 Del.icio.us with ads feels different, but there also many more users and social bookmarks are really made to be searched so am cool with it.

After years of going ad-free, del.icio.us has quietly started to integrate contextual search ads from Yahoo Search Marketing. For now, ads only show up when users search the entire index of bookmarks. Note the ads to the right of this search for Apple. Del.icio.us also rolled out a new home page that includes thumbnails and looks more like digg.

What's important to note here is that this is the first time there have been ads on del.icio.us since its inception. Also notable is that there are no contextual ads on del.icio.us tag pages yet. However, I am sure that Yahoo will soon move to monetize these pages since they are prime real estate on certain keywords.

Instituting ads on a service that is visited by hardcore techies can be dicey. So far, Yahoo seems to be wisely playing it conservatively to see how they fare. Digg has managed this transition nicely so there's no reason del.icio.us can't either. For more on my thoughts around tagvertising, see my post from last year.

 

Source: Del.icio.us Gets Contextual Ads, New Home Page
Originally published on 8/16/2006 4:47:39 PM by noemail@noemail.org (Steve Rubel)

Social bookmarking in a sentence

-shared tagged online bookmarks -

or if you need it simpler, tagged online bookmarks.

the tagging is for categorization, better than folders.

 

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a web based service, where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed.Social bookmarking sites generally organize their content using tags. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags.

The concept of shared online bookmarking dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies like Backflip, Blink,^{[citation needed]} Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, and others entering the market. Lacking viable models for making money, most of this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst. The contemporary concepts of social bookmarking and tagging took root with the launch of the web site del.icio.us, in September of 2003.

Functional Overview

In a Social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Advantages

This system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with present-day (2006) search engines.

Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will "rank" a resource based on its perceived utility. This is arguably a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

Automatic Notification

Since the classification and ranking of resources is a continuously evolving process, many social bookmarking services allow users to subscribe to syndication feeds (see RSS) based on tags, or collection of tag terms. This allows subscribers to become aware of new resources for a given topic, as they are noted, tagged, and classified by other users.

Disadvantages

There are drawbacks to such tag-based systems as well: no standard set of keywords (also known as controlled vocabulary), no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalization, etc.), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, highly unorthodox and "personalized" tag schemas from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g. a site might be labeled as both cheese and cheddar, with no mechanism that might indicate that cheddar is a refinement or sub-class of cheese).

The separate (but related) tagging and social bookmarking services are, however, evolving rapidly, and these shortcomings could possibly be addressed in the near future.

Free Implementation

Free (GNU GPL) implementation of social bookmarking tools exists, see Connotea from Nature Journal's Software Group.

See also

• Collaborative tagging
• List of social software
• Folksonomy
• Semantic Web
• social networking
• social software
• Tags

Other links

• Features to consider when choosing your social bookmark manager
• Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review
• Annotea and Semantic Web Supported Collaboration (PDF)
• Social Bookmarking Resources
• 7 Things you should know about social bookmarking (PDF)

About Tag Rag

I tag so i rag. Another blog about tagging and social bookmarking. or more honestly since i tag and i use blogger which does not support categorization, this is where i will blog about tagging

Collaborative tagging is regarded as democratic folksonomy metadata generation, i.e. rather than an individual controlling the metadata or tags about an article or other content, metadata is generated by both the creator and consumers of the content.

This caters for the long tail of search terminology by deliberately introducing minority keywords and removes the restriction placed on the content of metadata by a controlled vocabulary.

Although a collaborative tagging system is likely to generate meta noise, i.e. surperfluous metadata, this adds to the usefulness of the metadata as it continues to cater to the 'thin end' of the long tail of system users.

It differs from social bookmarking in that it relates to the tagging of content accessible to a large group from one place, rather than defining tags about content located elsewhere.