Winston Churchill

One of the things Technorati did when it began their tag scrapping was to include categories in the commercial blog tools (WordPress and Six Apart tools). I am not sure if this is still done or not.

With Technorati Tags the best value I find is their great interface on their Technorati Tags page. It aggregates social bookmarking tagging results from del.icio.us and furl as well as the photo sites that tag, like Flickr. The scraped tags are displayed in the center of it all. But, the Technorati Tags are what I find least valuable (I find them incredibly less valuable than their own keyword filters).

The down side of Technorati Tags runs across a few lines. But first I will pull together the optimal folksonomy tagging environment (which Technorati does not claim to be), which has three required data points: a distinct object being tagged, a distinct person tagging, and the distinct tags. With these three elements tags filtering can be performed to bring greater value from the corpus. On top of these three elements it is important for the consumer of the content to be performing the tagging, in their own self interest while sharing it with the community. This last component is where Technorati falls from a folksonomy tool, like del.icio.us, into regular tagging.

What is being tagged and by whom is difficult to discern in the open wilds that Technorati scrapes/indexes. In many blogs posts the person tagging is the content creator. But, it really gets confounded when it is unclear whether the tag applies to one or more of the links in their post, the tag is stating what their post is about, or is providing a tag as a summary of the post’s content.

Where I find the Technorati Tags lacking is when I click on a link and the only place the term is being used in the post is in the tag. I too often I can not find a reason for the tag as it relates to their post. When people are selecting tags for their content based on what they think others may call it, we get into a very slippery slope that quickly lands at the doorstep of Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap. This makes it tough to discern language and definitions for the tag terms. Understanding what is being tagged and the vocabulary of the person tagging I may filter in or out that person in my list of people to follow or ignore on specific tag terms.

This is not the fault of Technorati, but it is an unclear practice and implementation on the part of many tagging. In these cases a marriage of the tags and the terms in the text of the posts could provide improved results. Some believe this algorithmic approach is the best way to go, while others believe this is best done by humans. It is important to keep in mind people are loving this tagging stuff at the moment and finding a way to harvest that energy would be helpful. The selfish tagging in del.icio.us and to a large degree in Flickr is what really caught my eye and that of others at the time folksonomy was coined. The richness and value to the individuals was easy to perceive, which was quite different than all tagging efforts that had come before them.

I am finding solid results lately from the nascent Yahoo MyWeb 2 Search, which is quite similar to del.icio.us in many aspects, but the results are layered on top of the regular Yahoo search results from those in your community.

If my assumption is correct, then the method you mention is certainly better than any engine-specific method.

Note the text, about half way down the page: “You do not have to link to Technorati.”. I can link to my own category pages, without giving any SEO benefit to Technorati, and still be indexed.

This doesn’t sound so bad to me.