Semantic Web Or Tagged Web

An interesting post on Bernie Goldbach’s blog about tags and tagging the Irish blogosphere brings the Semantic Web to blogging. The Semantic Web is an attempt to classify the web giving it a clearly defined structure. From a search engine operator’s point of view, a more structured web is a good thing. It would make it easier to create niche search engines and directories and make the web more usable. However it is an academic idea and like most academic ideas, there is a gap between academia and reality.

The reality of the Semantic web is that the web developers have to implement it. It has to be part of the webdevelopment software that the average web developer uses to create that five page brochureware website. Until that universality is achieved, the Semantic Web will remain, mainly, the subject of seminars and course books. But tagging seems to be routing around academia and into the reality of the web.

The rise of tagging on the web has been slow. The Technorati self-categorisation model is interesting. By using an Technorati tag it is possible to include a blog in the Technorati’s Irish blogs. It makes it easier to identify Irish blogs but there is a catch. Not all Irish bloggers use these tags. Any such self identifying movement goes through this phase before it reaches the mass market. The early adopters find it first and then the connectors and super salespeople the “The Tipping Point” book by Malcom Gladwell explains the process well (Amazon.co.uk) (Amazon.com).

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Written by John McCormac on February 19th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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4 comments

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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com fmk
#1. February 19th, 2005, at 9:57 PM.

but doesn’t this whole self-tagging thing just take us back to meta tags? and we all know how easy they were to abuse.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Bernie Goldbach
#2. February 20th, 2005, at 12:35 AM.

I think tagging on Flickr photostreams and on del.icio.us social bookmarks works better than tagging hyperlinks on blog entries.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#3. February 20th, 2005, at 9:07 PM.

Tagging photostreams is a lot better than having a search engine try to categorise them Bernie. The social bookmarks aspect is a very interesting one though and one that could be the next evolution of the super directories like Dmoz which rely on people editing and categorising websites.

The idea of tagging websites is not new. Some people mentioned that it could help the bigger search engines like Google and Yahoo if a geolocation tag was included in the meta data for webpages. The social bookmarks idea turns it on its head and puts the user/reader rather than the webmaster at the top of the chain. It also is similar to how the Amazon book recommendation system works. I remember Philip Greenspun describing an example of MIT Medialab cluelessness about how some e-jits developed something there called Firefly to suggest potential book choices to customers on a book site while Amazon’s solution was obvious and simple. Social bookmarks system have that elegant simplicity.

Social bookmarks are perhaps more difficult to game than a self-categorisation system because they have a consensus aspect that self-categorisation does not have. Photostreams and their categorisation give search engine operators nightmares.