Dec 05
9
New blog aims to improve tagging performance
For many years, my work has been driven by my knowledge of how classification adds value to information within large organisations. How much more rewarding blogging could become if blogger communities were to become more skilled in this art.
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I have started with an analysis of Technorati’s most popular tags, as the first step in project to bring bloggers the benefits of classification systems to make their blogs much more easily findable, as well to make reader searching more meaningful. The new Supertaggers blog aims to work with users to design multidimensional classification systems (also known as ‘multifaceted taxonomies’) without all the painful discipline and top down authoritarianism associated with the field.
The project is dedicated to using intuitive classification terms or supertags as a both means of improving the find-ability of blogs and of monitoring what they are saying.
An important feature of this initiative is that any classification systems developed or posted on Supertaggers during the project will be available for free to all bloggers without copyright restriction.
As Seth Godin says in latest ebook, “Everyone is an Expert”, the challenge that Web 2.0 is facing up to is one of meaning and making sense, not one of merely searching and matching. His Squidoo knowledge pointing service already uses top level categories as a way into the all-too-familiar long alphabetical lists of tags which plague the blog experience.
What Squidoo needs in order to focus its lenses is an organised system of collaborative supertags which go beyond the top level. Then some really interesting and original knowledge juxtapositions (aka insights) would come into being, yielding the kind of meta-knowledge that H G Wells foresaw in his World Brain ideas which are now coming to fruition after more than 70 years.