Is Tagging As (in)Effective As Meta Data?
Some time ago, Technorati.com introduced tagging and over the past few weeks, I’ve used it on some posts here. The idea is that bloggers would add a tag to their posts to allow Technorati to group the posts in with other similarly themed posts from other blogs. Simple idea? Yes but there is a catch - the bloggers have to include a tag on their post that links back to technorati’s server. (Eg: http://technorati.com/tag/IrishBlogs).
Tagging is to blogging what meta data is to web pages. Back in the mid 1990s, meta data made web pages easier to categorise. Each page would, theoretically, have a description and keywords. Technology was expensive then and meta data offered search engine operators a cheaper and more effective method. Web pages and web sites could simply be categorised by stripping out the page title, the description and the keywords. But like any simplistic system, it was easily gamed for commercial purposes. Some keywords guaranteed hits. As the price of technology fell, full text indexing of webpages by search engines became viable. Even then there were people stuffing keywords into the text of webpages. These keywords where in the background colour so that only the search engines would see them - the user would not.
Meta Data is a nice academic concept but like its tagging offspring, it relies on one critical aspect - the website developer has to include it in the webpage source code. Even years after they were introduced, at least 70% of webpages do not have proper meta data. A recent check on Irish websites showed that out of 33239 .ie websites, only 9710 sites have title, description and keywords. Like meta data, tagging is self-categorisation. But often bloggers will already have specific categories listed on their sites.
The problem with tagging is that it is an “early days” solution to a complex problem. With ordinary websites, the link model is one that describes the links between what are often static business sites. The link model with blogs is different. Blogs are often a stream of consciousness. Bloggers link to each other rather than to websites. Simply grouping blog posts rather than discovering their interconnectivity is an easy way for Technorati to develop what is in effect a dynamic web directory of blogger posts. But like any automated system, it has weaknesses. The IrishBlogs tag has essentially been taken over by Richard Delevan (a freelance journalist in Dublin). Because he posts early and often, Technorati’s date based grouping bumps his blog to the top of the list. This is not gaming the system. Technorati is best thought of as a group of tags with each tag having a small set of associated blogs. The effect of sorting using the time that the page or post was last updated means that the most recent post will appear at the top. This problem of updated content is an old one for search engines. The solution that search engines adopted was to effectively remove the update or ping aspect from the user side and to periodically spider websites.
Irish bloggers do not typically incude Technorati tags in their posts. As blogging becomes a mass-market phenomena, including tags has to be made easy. It has to be made part of the blogging software so that bloggers can include a tag as simply as clicking on an icon. But by the time that tagging hits the mass market, the big search engines such as Google will have deeply integrated blogs into their existing search indices. Google could even be planning their own blog specific search in the same way that they have a news, usenet and image search option. Given the size of the world blogosphere and the frequency at which it updates, it would be trivial for a large search engine to create its own blog search index. But by including blogs in their main search indices, the larger search engines regard blogs as part of the mainstream web.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Technorati , Tags , Search Engines
Written by John McCormac on March 11th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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