Library clips

On a previous post I blogged about Open Tags, this post from a while back concisely explains the Open Topics issue.

Of late it seems this concept is also moving into other areas, as initially posted by Stowe over at Corante.
Here are the other posts in this stream:
Open Tags: Made For A Distributed World
Drummond Reed on Open Tagging
iTags = Open Tags?

From what I understand about Technorati Tags is that you don’t have to point to the Technorati website, you can point to any website, as long as you have the rel=tag, Technorati will pick it up.
So this kind of makes tags open already as you can point anywhere, it is up to the aggregating services to notice your tags and collect your posts.
Services like Technorati will even pick up posts in your blog categories, treating them as tags (so for these tags you are pointing internally), you can even get plug-ins to organise your blog posts in tags…here’s one for MT…I guess this way, the tags point to your blog just as categories do.

How does Technorati know of your blog in the first place, well you have to make sure you ping it, tell it you are actively posting.

What if a subject specific service came along, well they would have to somehow use their discretion to scour a particular set of tags, or they could even aggregate tags from someone already doing it, like Technorati.

So to make it clear if you make a tag in your blog pointing to a wikipedia URL, both Technorati and IceRocket (or whoever else) will pick it up (even though you are not pointing to them directly), as long as they see the rel=”tag” everything is OK…and of course you have to ping them to let them know you have updated your blog, although they seem to re-visit my blog regardless.
Some people even point to their own collecting service such as HonorTags (making their own mini Technorati).

So then why is the service iTags being developed as:
“…a way to denote that a post relates to a concept, without neccessarily pointing to a particular tagspace…”

…as from my explanation it doesn’t matter who you point to as any service can pick it up by seeing your rel=tag…so it doesn’t matter who you explicitly point to, or that the fact that you are pointing to something…see more at Technorati…you can even make your tags invisible.

From Mary’s post:

“This solution also addresses these user desires:
1. create tags without links that are still visible in the blog post
2. create tags that are not visible but still trusted (like categories which are not visible but still included in systems like Technorati’s tag system, where of the 100% of tags, 95% are actually category entries and only 5% are actual tags).”

You can do these 2 things already with rel=tag, so I’m just not sure how iTags is different…is anyone willing to enlighten me?

What does the following mean:
…it would remove the requirement for a tag to be coupled with the originating URL (blog post URL) because identity would be inside it.”

So what is then unique about Stowe’s thinking, well he suggests that these aggregators pick up our tags (maybe via iTags) but still likes the idea of every post labelled and pointing to a taggregator so someone reading your blog can go (from your post) to these specific tag pages at various aggregators.
But the blogger doesn’t manually label and point to all these taggregators in his/her blog post, this information will appear via the taggregators sending you a trackback to say I have collected your post and filed it within this tag/s, click to our service to browse this tag and have a look at other like posts.
So maybe the idea for iTags is for your tags to act like blog categories, they point to your blog, well actually it seems they don’t point anywhere, but you must somehow have to label your post with tags as you do categories so the taggregators can harvest your posts so to speak.

So if 5 taggregators are collecting your posts (including human collected aggregators like social bookmark services) then you will get 5 trackbacks from 5 different services…now you and your readers will know where your posts are travelling on the web as these places will have the courtesy of notifying you.

I like how Sriram puts it:
“I tag now and at a later date when a taggregator has use for the content that I’ve tagged, he crawls it and
pings me. So, now at a place that my tag points to lies a list of ’service’s where more tag-related information is available.”

More from Stowe’s post:
“…the blogger could create (via plugins or builtin blog functionality) a local tagspace, where all the entries that mention a tag would be listed, much like existing category archives (which is conceivably one way to implement it). Taggregation could be simply achieved by taking RSS feeds from such local tagspaces, and consolidating. For example, we could create a Corante tagspace by instituting local tagspaces at all Corante blogs, and aggregating those into a Corante-wide tagspace.”

Is this similar to what HonorTags does, point your posts to a local tag space (a mini Technorati)…but is there a way to make this exclusive, so not just anyone can point to this tag space, or is it up to the taggregator whether to accept it or not…something similar is mentioned here.

But do you need a tagspace, what about Community Engine’s remix project, Bud seems to make a tag cloud from everyone’s blog categories and del.icio.us tags.
If blog tags can act the same as blog categories, then you can just collate these as Bud does, instead of the blogger explicitly asking to be included by pointing to the site.

I guess k-collector does something similar with topics in RSS feeds via ENT…if tags could act like inbuilt categories then ENT would be able to transport all your blog categories and blog tags.

Another way is to make a service like Topic Exchange, by making each topic a tag, and when the blogger makes a post they trackback the various tags at Topic Exchange…then you can make a tag cloud from all the topics.

Again how do you make this exclusive, as anyone could trackback these topics (tags) at the Topic Exchange, and also not all blogs have trackback…and mostly your blog post doesn’t have any tags on it for people to browse from your post to taggregator service’s which is an essential part of the vision.

Anyway, consort Sriram’s post mentioned before for similar ideas, such as: tagspaces, and tagspeak.