Tag: technorati

A Story About Tags, and Technorati, and Tags [en]

[fr] Une conversation sur Twitter au sujet des tags, de la grande époque de Technorati, et de où on en est maintenant. Ce qu'on a perdu: un "tagspace" commun pour la blogosphère (c'était ce qu'offrait Technorati...).

Yesterday I innocently answered a tweet about Technorati tags from Luis Suarez. This led to an interesting three-way conversation between Luis, Thomas Vander Wal. Ideas got tossed around, and we decided to continue the discussion through our blogs, as if it were 2003 (2001?) all over again. You know, I really miss the old blogging days, sometimes. But more about that in another post.

Now, before I get to the meat, I want to tell you a little about the history of tags and tagging. I was there, you see — and I’d like to tell you what I saw of history unfolding at the time, because it gives some background to the ideas that came up for me while chatting with Luis and Thomas.

(Note that I am absolutely not using the sacred inverted pyramid here. I’m not trying to optimize. I’m taking you for a ride, come along if you wish.)

A long long time ago, when the blogosphere was frisky and bloggers were still strange beasts, Movable Type invented the Trackback.

Trackbacks were exciting. You have to understand that at the time, comments on blogs were barely a couple of years old, and bloggers still had the good habit of carrying on conversations through their blogs, linking to each other’s articles like there was no tomorrow. Trackbacks allowed us bloggers to tell each other we were mentioning each other’s posts without having to “head over there and leave a comment” or rely on the linkee’s obsession with referrer monitoring (all our metrics and stats tools were much more primitive at the time, and we didn’t have Google Alerts).

Some people started sending trackbacks when their posts were simply related to posts on other blogs — an abusive practice, if you ask me, laying the grounds for what was to become trackback spam.

Enter TopicExchange. It doesn’t exist anymore, but I fell in love with it right away. TopicExchange was a site which hosted “channels”, keywords that you could trackback so that your post would appear in a given channel. TopicExchange was, in fact, a somewhat clumsy precursor of tagspaces. The idea was there, but it was built on trackbacks rather than microformats.

Roughly around that same period (of years), delicious started using tags to allow users to classify bookmarks. Flickr followed, and tagging started to take off.

In 2005, Technorati started tracking tags in blog posts it indexed, and the microformat for tagging was born. Days later, I’d released the first WordPress tagging plugin, Bunny’s Technorati Tags. Now, you may not care much about Technorati in 2010, but at the time, it was a Big Thing.

First of all, Technorati were the only ones indexing what they then called the “Live Web” (or was it the “Living Web”, I can’t remember). Forget Twitter, Facebook, and today’s real-time craziness: in 2005, blogs were pretty much the fastest form of publication around. Google Blogsearch didn’t exist. So, bloggers (and blogging software) would ping Technorati each time they published an article, Technorati would crawl their RSS feed and index their content. This meant you could search for stuff in blogs. Technorati indexed links between blog posts, so you could look up the “Technorati Cosmos” for any URL (ie, the collection of blog posts linking to it.)

If you were serious about blogging, you made sure you were in Technorati. And your properly tagged articles would appear on the corresponding Technorati tag page. (See where this meets TopicExchange?)

Second, and this is where in my opinion the Technorati implementation of “let’s group posts from different bloggers about a same topic on a single page somewhere” beats TopicExchange: it’s based on a microformat, technologically much simpler to implement than a trackback. Anybody who could write HTML could add tags. It also meant that other tools or companies could create their own tagspaces and index existing tags — which was not possible with a trackback-based implementation, as trackbacks are “pushed” to one specific recipient.

The blogosphere went wild with tags, and my brain started bubbling on the topic.

TopicExchange died, drowned under trackback spam.

And as far as I’m concerned, Technorati is dead (at least to me), probably drowned or crippled by splogs and tag spam.

Which leads me to express a law which I’ll call “Stephanie Booth’s Law of Death by Spam”, just in case nobody had thought of it before, and it catches on and makes me famous:

Sooner or later, all smart ideas to better connect people or ideas through technology drown in spam, unless the arms race to defeat it is taken seriously enough and given the ressources it needs.

Right, I think you have enough context now, and I can come back to the conversation that kept Luis, Thomas and I occupied for a bit last night. Luis was asking if anybody still cared about Technorati tags, and we drifted off (at least I did) on the Golden Days of Technorati (hence the slightly nostalgic storytelling that makes up the first big chunk of this post).

Clearly, Technorati is not playing the role it used to play for the blogosphere (whatever that is nowadays, the blogosphere I mean, now that every online publication is a “blog”).

There’s Icerocket, which actually does a not-too-bad job of letting you search for stuff over blog posts (check out my ego search and blog search). Actually, as I’m writing this, I’m discovering that their advanced search is pretty neat (though I’m not certain why this query returns nothing).

One issue I see with Icerocket is that you have to actively sign up and include tracking code on your blog — which means that less bloggers will go through the trouble of getting themselves indexed (and less spammers, of course, which is probably the idea, though I did spot a few splogs in my searches above). Another one is that it’s not very visible. Do you bloggers know about it? Have you registered? Does it bring you traffic? Technorati had cosmos and tag links that made it visible on the blogs it indexed (just as I tried to make TopicExchange more visible in my blog when I was using it).

Another more systemic issue is that a “blog” today and a “blog” in 2005 is not the same thing. Well, some are (I hope this one is), but nowadays we have all these big online publications that I call media-blogs: run as businesses, multi-author, revenue-stream… Their quality ranges from cheap content-factory to properly journalistic. Are they still blogs? In 2010, what is a blogger? What kind of blogs do I want to see indexed by a service like Icerocket — and is there some objective way to draw lines, or am I letting my personal bias take over? As you may know, my work around blogger accreditations for LeWeb has led me to ponder the lines between journalist, blogger, other-online-publisher. I don’t have answers yet.

But I digress.

When WordPress finally implemented proper tags, the default tagspace was not Technorati (as it had been with my plugin), but a tagspace local to the WordPress installation. This made sense in some way (probably by that time tag spam on Technorati was already taking its toll) — but we lost something precious in the process: a shared space where separate blogs and blog posts could collide over common topics.

I want that back. But maybe I don’t want a tagspace shared by the whole humungous somethingsphere of 2010. So, how about this?

Let’s imagine a tool/platform which allows a certain number of bloggers to gather together, as a group. You know all about groups, in their various incarnations: Flickr groups, Google groups, Facebook groups, new Facebook groups… What about blogger groups? I could gather a bunch of bloggers I know and like, and who know each other, and who tend to read each other, and we could decide to create a little blogosphere of our own. The group could be public, private, invitation-only, whatever.

And this group would have a shared tagspace.

If you’re starting from scratch, you’d do this with a multi-user WordPress implementation (go to WordPress.com for example: there is a shared tagspace for the blogs there). But here, imagine the bloggers in question already have blogs. Would there be no way to recreate this, independantly of which blogging tools they’re using?

This is similar but not identical to shared spaces like SxDSalon. SxDSalon slurps in all posts with a given tag from a list of bloggers. It’s nice, it works, it’s useful, but it’s not what I’m thinking of.

Planet is a cool tool too, but to my knowledge it only aggregates posts. Maybe we could add a shared tagspace to it?

I look forward to reading what Luis and Thomas will write on their blogs about our conversation. 😉 Blogs are alive! Twitter has not killed them!

Tag-Related Wishlist [en]

[fr] Mes idées/prédictions/désirs pour l'évolution des tags et des technologies associées.

I told you my mind never stops spinning, didn’t I? Here are a few follow-up thoughts on my previous post on tags. View this as my brain dump of what I’d like tags to do in WordPress and around.

Bear in mind that I haven’t tried 2.3 yet, don’t know exactly what it does and doesn’t do, and haven’t done much homework. So (hopefully!) some of the stuff I’m speaking about here already exists. If it’s the case, please leave a note with a pointer in the comments.

Some of the stuff here might also be stupid. If it is, please tell me.

I don’t think all this should necessarily be in the WordPress core. Plugin makers, feel free to delve in here for inspiration. If I like your plugin, I’ll plug it.

Links Between Tagspaces

So, based on what I’ve understood, WP2.3 will provide a local tagspace. This means that if I tag a post “cat”, the link on that tag will take me to something like myblog.com/tags/cat. That’s cool.

But I want more.

I want the myblog.com/tags/cat page to contain configurable pointers to other tagspaces. For example, my Flickr photos tagged “cat”. My del.icio.us links. My videos. The Technorati tagspace.

See what I mean?

Somewhere, WordPress would ask me “What other tagspaces would you like links to?” and I’d enter “http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/tags/”, “http://del.icio.us/steph/”, “http://www.viddler.com/explore/steph/tags/”, “http://technorati.com/tag/” in some pretty form (we know how to do those now, don’t we?)

Alternate Tagspaces

Some people may not want to use the local tagspace. Hell, most people who tag their posts right now point to the Technorati tagspace. An option to do so could be nice.

Tag Combinations

I’d like my local WordPress tagspace to allow tag combinations. This is the stuff I wrote about nearly 3 years ago. Del.icio.us does it: here are my links tagged “books” AND “read”.

We need more of this, particularly if we start thinking multilingual. I want to be able to point to a page containing posts I tagged “adolescents” OR “teenagers” OR “ados” or “teens”. I use all those, but I’m sure (given the nature of tagging) some posts have slipped through the cracks and have only one or two of these tags.

Less multilingual, maybe I just want to have “cats” or “cat” (sometimes I use plural, sometimes singular, and the distinction isn’t important to me in this context).

Related Tags

Del.icio.us does this. My local tagspace pages should have this feature too.

And how about an option to be able to see (in a click) posts tagged “cat” AND all the posts tagged with one of the related tags? (This could become a bit unwieldy though.)

Tag Management

The “obvious” stuff. Rename tag “stephaniebooth” to “Stephanie Booth” everywhere it is. (Flickr does this well.) Merge tags. Add a bunch of tags to all the selected posts (result of a search or by-category selection). Remove tag X from all posts which are tagged Y.

This is the kind of stuff I wanted to make possible for categories when I wrote Batch Categories, a lifetime ago. I haven’t touched this “hack” for years now, and I’ve heard conflicting information about its compatibility with recent WordPress versions. I think somebody somewhere updated it for WP2.x — if you search you might find it.

Public Tagging

Now, this would be a source of tag spam, unless it’s for example limited to registered users of the blog, or people identified by OpenID or on a “trust list” (e.g. people who have commented on the blog before). I’ve encouraged people to open up tagging to the community on Flickr, and the feedback from those who have done it has been great. I’d like a way to do this for my blog posts, too.

I’m sure structured portable social networks have a part to play here.

More Importing/Conversion

Ages ago, I added keywords to my blog posts. (I now know it’s not very useful — maybe even, not at all.) Around the same time, I used Topic Exchange Channels for some of my posts, making the ITE channel visible on the post by adding a link to it (gosh, come to think of it — I hadn’t heard of tags yet, but what I was doing was some form of proto-tagging… quite impressed with myself!)

Anyway, leaving the self-congratulatory stuff aside, my wp_postmeta table contains old information about posts which has long since disappeared from this blog, but which is still there, ready to be recycled. I could turn those old keywords and ITE channels into tags with an importer.

So, how about a very “customizable” importer? I would give the meta field name I want to convert to tags, and indicate if the tag data is comma-separated, space-separated, or simply placed in multiple fields.

(For my old keywords, there is one meta field called “keywords” which contains a comma-separated list of words, whereas for the ITE channels there is one entry per channel called “ite_topic” (IIRC) with a unique word as a value — but there can be more than one channel per post.)

So, “manual importer”, anybody?

That’s All, Folks!

There, I think I’ve told you what was on my mind. Feedback welcome. And plugins. Code. Solutions.

Basic Bilingual and Bunny's Technorati Tags Plugins Updated for WordPress 2.1 [en]

[fr] Mise à jour de mes deux plugins pour WP2.1 qui les cassait gravement. Mises à jour pas testées, à manier avec précaution.

Thanks to Sudar, who took the trouble to fix Bunny’s Technorati Tags so that it worked with WP2.1, here are up-to-date version of these two plugins, Bunny’s Technorati Tags and Basic Bilingual:

The previous, WordPress 2.0-compatible versions are still available:

Warning: these old versions suffer from the empties custom fields problem. Don’t use them with 2.1.

Disclaimer: I’m swamped with work, haven’t upgraded yet, and haven’t tested the new versions of the plugins. Use carefully. Let me know if there are glitches. Bunny’s Technorati Tags is the very version Sudar put online (I’m making it available here mainly as there are links to it out there beyond my control, not the least from the wp-plugins.org wiki which has been closed to editing due to spam.) For Basic Bilingual, however, I adapted the code Sudar had added to Bunny Tags, but I don’t fully understand if it works. Backup, try gingerly, and please leave comments here to let others (and myself) know if it works or breaks.

Thanks.

You Should Twitter [en]

[fr] A découvrir absolument, Twitter, un service au croisement du moblogging et de la messagerie instantanée. Inscrivez-vous et essayez! Je vois du potentiel ici pour les adolescents, dans le sens où ça permet de s'envoyer des SMS sans devoir donner à l'autre son numéro de mobile.

Twitter is a cross between moblogging and instant messaging. You can send messages by SMS or by IM and they are displayed on your page.

In addition to that, people who have chosen to “follow” you get updates by IM or SMS. It’s easy to add/remove a person from those you are following using the mobile lingo.

I see great things for this product once they implement groups and allow some granularity regarding privacy (ie, stuff only for my friends, stuff only for my family, stuff only for my co-workers, public stuff, stuff for my girlsfriends). I already see the potential of Twitter as an SMS anonymizer (think teenagers and dating sites).

Go and grab an account, register your cell number (if it works with a Swiss phone number, it should work with anything!) and start twittering! You can even try to ping Technorati with your new TwitterBlog. But can you claim it, Mr. Marks?

Hack: Make Bunny Tags Point to Your Blog Tagspace [en]

[fr] Un petit bidouillage pour que mon plugin wordpress pour ajouter des tags ne montre (dans Technorati) que les billets de votre propre blog.

Here’s a quick hack for all of you who, like Fabienne, are disappointed that my Bunny’s Technorati Tags plugin points to the technorati tagspace instead of just your own posts.

For it to work, your plugin files need to be writable (how to do this is beyond the scope of this post, but try looking for a way to chmod 777 or whatever in your FTP program; if you use the command line, then chmod -R 777 wp-content/plugins should do it). Then, open the plugin editor (WP admin screen > Plugins > Plugin Editor) and edit the file for Bunny’s Technorati Tags.

Look for this code:

 $tag_link='<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/' . urlencode(urldecode($tag))
 . '" title="' . __('See the Technorati tag page for', 'BunnyTags') . ' ''
 . urldecode($tag) . ''." rel="tag">' . $display_tag . '</a>' . $separator;
 // make a link to the technorati tag page, with tag link text

And replace it with this:

 $tag_link='<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/' . urlencode(urldecode($tag))
 . '?from=' . get_settings('home') . '" title="'
 . __('On Technorati: see posts from this blog tagged', 'BunnyTags') . ' ''
 . urldecode($tag) . ''." rel="tag">' . $display_tag . '</a>' . $separator;
 // make a link to the technorati tag page, with tag link text

This isn’t quite the same as pointing them to a page on your blog which contains all the posts. But the final result is pretty similar. Otherwise, Fabienne says that Jerome’s Keywords Plugin does the trick for her.

Trying WPMU [en]

[fr] Très bref compte-rendu de mon installation de WordPress multi-utilisateurs, la version sous laquelle tourne WordPresss.com, qui existe d'ailleurs maintenant en français. Jetez-vous dessus!

I gave WordPress Multi-User a try (that’s the version of WordPress that WordPress.com runs on). Took me roughly half an hour to install from start to finish, then about an hour or two of diluted DNS/vhost troubleshooting until I was told to add ServerAlias *.wpmu.domain.com to the vhost file.

I installed the theme pack, and I think I got my technorati tags and basic bilingual plugins working (not 100% sure because I haven’t tried using the template tags yet). PHP Markdown Extra works but only if you activate it at blog-level.

I have great ideas about creating a “bunny-approved” package of WPMU now 🙂

Dell s'y met aussi! [fr]

[en] Announcing Dell's blog.

A surveiller: le blog de Dell. Jetez un oeil, du coup, à ce qu’en disent les blogueurs. Vous pouvez aussi voir ce que raconte la blogosphère au sujet de Dell. Comme quoi, les blogs ce n’est pas que pour les PME, ça marche aussi dans les grandes boîtes!

Technorati est un service vraiment utile, dommage que tout le monde ne le connaisse pas encore! Robert Scoble nous rapportait il y a quelques jours comment il a montré Technorati à une équipe de dirigeants Nestlé: ils ignoraient totalement qu’ils pouvaient suivre en temps quasi-réel ce qui se dit au sujet de leur marque! (Il y a un peu de bruit, c’est sûr, mais garder un oeil là-dessus peut s’avérer loin d’être inutile.)

ETech: I'm at Microformats BOF! [en]

[fr] Petite démonstration avec apparition vidéo de bibi à  ETech, dans un peu moins de deux heures. Didier Barbas a bossé dur sur le projet!

Well, almost. There should be a minute or so of video footage of me in Kevin‘s lightening demo on tags during the Microformats Panel tonight.

Check it out! It has to do with this little project. Didier Barbas wrote the code, graduating from coding slave to coding hero in the process. If you need an Iron Coder, hire him! (He tells me he loves it…)

So, head off to Microformats BOF.

Vous parlez de la blogosphère suisse? [fr]

[en] Tag posts talking about the swiss blogosphere (or swiss meta-blogging issues) with blogosphera helvetica. The posts can then be syndicated to create a true multi-author metablog. This seems to me a better solution then setting up a new multi-author blog somewhere. Let's use what we already have: bloggers!

Je crois que tout le monde (ou presque) a réalisé que la blogosphère suisse commence à bouillonner. Mais peut-on parler de blogosphère “suisse”? Savons-nous ce que nos amis d’outre-Sarine fabriquent avec leurs blogs? Les frontières linguistiques sont les plus fortes que l’on puisse trouver sur le web. Pour cause, ce sont pour ainsi dire les seules.

Swiss Metablog fait pas mal de “veille blogosphérique” suisse, mais c’est en allemand. J’ai un compte, mais je ne l’utilise presque pas car j’ai déjà de la peine à suivre avec CTTS. Le blog de iFeedYou aborde souvent également des sujets touchant aux blogs dans notre douce Helvétie.

On a proposé et reproposé de faire un blog multi-auteurs et multilingue pour tenter de rapprocher un peu les différents groupes linguistiques. N’oublions pas non plus qu’il y a en Suisse aussi des italophones, des anglophones, et des toutes-sortes-de-phones.

Alors, voici l’idée: on va utiliser un tag pour identifier les billets qui traitent de la blogosphère helvète. Pour ne pas faire de jaloux, on va parler latin: blogosphera helvetica. Ensuite, on peut consulter la page du tag, s’y abonner, et même syndiquer le contenu pour en faire un meta-meta-blog quelque part.

Je crois que c’est plus viable de demander à des blogueurs déjà fort occupés de simplement rajouter un petit tag sur un billet qu’ils écrivent de toute façon pour leur blog, plutôt que de leur demander d’aller écrire le billet ailleurs.

Qu’en pensez-vous?

Précision 08.03.06: ce tag (blogch ou blogospherahelvetica, on verra) ne sert pas à identifier un billet comme étant “suisse”. Il sert à identifier un billet qui parle de ce qui se passe en Suisse côté blogs. Le public cible pour ce tag est “quelqu’un qui veut savoir où en sont les blogs en Suisse, et ce qui est en train de se passer d’important”. Regardant les quelques billets que j’ai tagués ainsi, je me demande si c’est pertinent pour chacun. Les aurais-je tous publiés dans un blog multi-auteurs portant sur la blogosphère suisse? Pas certain. A méditer…

Get Listed in Technorati Blog Search [en]

[fr] Technorati est le meilleur moteur de recherche spécialisé dans les blogs. Pour être listé dedans, il est important que votre outil de weblog envoie un ping à  Technorati chaque fois que vous publiez un billet. Ainsi, vos tags seront pris en compte.

Technorati comporte également un répertoire de blogs sur lequel je compte m'appuyer pour la nouvelle version de SwissBlogs. Pour y être listé, il suffit de créer un compte chez Technorati et de déclarer votre blog. N'oubliez pas de lui ajouter des tags! Helvetia, en particulier, si c'est un blog suisse.

Il est aussi facile de faire ajouter son blog dans le répertoire sans faire de compte chez Technorati. Il suffit d'ajouter le code suivant (à  adapter selon vos besoins) pour chaque tag que vous désirez attribuer à  votre blog, dans un billet ou quelque part sur la page principale de votre blog: <a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/helvetia" rel="tag directory">Je suis un blog suisse!</a>

You know Technorati is just about the best blog search engine out there. If you want the right people to be able to find you, you should be in Technorati.

First, you want to ping Technorati. Normally, your blogging software does this for you. If it doesn’t, you need to (a) bug your blogging software provider to implement pinging Technorati and (b) in the meantime, ping manually each time you post. Not sure if you’re pinging or not? Do a search for your URL. If Technorati shows your blog title, you have pinged at least once.

Second, you want to be in the Blog Finder Directory. There are two ways to do this.

  1. [Sign up for an account](http://technorati.com/signup/ "It's easy! Create a Technorati account.") and once that is done, [claim your blog](http://technorati.com/account/blogs "It's easy too! Tell Technorati which blogs are yours."). You can then [configure your blog](http://technorati.com/account/blogs/edit/1 "Direct link to configuring your first claimed blog.") to add tags and other juicy bits of information (optional). If you have a swiss blog, try adding the tag [helvetia](http://technorati.com/blogs/helvetia "See list of blogs tagged helvetia.") to your blog. Surprises in store soon.

  2. If you don't want to bother with signing up with Technorati or claiming your blog, it's easy: just add directory tags to your blog. Directory tags are [like tags](https://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/03/01/comment-faire-des-tags/ "How to tag, in French."), only you need to use the <code>rel="tag directory"</code> attribute on the link instead of just <code>rel="tag"</code>. Example? Add the following code anywhere on your blog to be tagged as "helvetia": <code><a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/helvetia" rel="tag directory">I'm a swiss blog!</a></code>. Adapt to any tag you wish to use. You can add upto 20 per blog.

Questions in the comments, please!