Library clips

Hoffbauer is a recent finding that is ripping off my content.
My whole post is there, but my author name is no where to be seen, at least the title links back to my post.

But there is no where on the blog that lists the sources it re-syndicates as the content for the blog, and it lacks an information page to tell you where the content is coming from and that the premise of the blog is authored by other blogs.

I don’t even know if I’m being re-syndicated or it’s just ripped me the old fashioned way.

Can’t they just use a tool like SuprGlu for this sort of thing…arghhh!

I don’t mind being re-syndicated if it is done the right way, the polite way.

A few posts ago I mentioned that Technorati has a tag cloud for your profile, clicking on a tag from here will list your posts within that tag…so the next step is to put a tag cloud on your blog.

This way people can browse your blog by tag…even though it takes them to a page outside your blog, who cares, it is good enough for now…only if Technorati would provide this code…anybody listening.

NOTE:If you bookmark your blog posts in del.icio.us and put the tagroll on your sidebar this is a similar idea, but now you can nearly do this with Technorati, so you need not bother bookmark your blog posts in del.icio.us for this reason (I guess bookmarking in del.icio.us gives your blog posts more exposure, but some consider this spamming, anyway there are ways to automatically bookmark your posts at time of posting - no effort at all).

Also a clever idea I found at Freshblog was the way you could choose a del.icio.us tag from a hacked drop down list on your sidebar and it would list posts within that tag at your blog instead of launching to del.icio.us, very clever (but I’d like to do this from the tagroll without using the hack drop down)…here’s another implementation.
I can’t see why this can’t be done if we are going to use the Technorati tag cloud in the future…the good thing about launching to the Technorati site is that you can further view items within a tag by all blogs.

Or what about just making internal tags (but how would you make a tag cloud from internal tags…see more.)

If you don’t use tags, Technorati still picks up your blog categories as tags, so you can have a tag cloud version of your categories…now you have two ways to browse categories, one within your blog, and one outside your blog (but the good thing about a tag cloud, as opposed to a list, is it gives context to your categories).

Anyway I failed to mention in the other post that at the end of every blog post we can now point to our user space at Technorati Tags…before hand at the end of a post we listed some tags that point to Technorati Tags or wherever you like, this is good to discover other like content, but you can’t see other like content just from your site…well now you can as our user name can be included in the URL.

Here’s the old way:
folksonomy

This is the code:
a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/folksonomy” rel=”tag”>folksonomy

NOTE: I haven’t included the opening and closing tags, as then my raw code disappears, is there an easier way to treat the HTML as normal text so I can publish the code.

Here’s the new way:
folksonomy

This is the code:
a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/folksonomy?user=johnt” rel=”tag”>folksonomy

Actually I don’t know if this new way works, but it would be good if it did…of course you could list both ways, but you really only need to list the new way, as when it launches to your user tag page on Technorati, you are one click away from “Search all blogs”.

Passing categories

Before I mentioned a post that hacked a category box into your blog that re-directed your del.icio.us tags to be viewed within your blog (this is crucial for Blogger users so people can browse their posts by category, as this is not a feature of Blogger).

If you read on there is also mention of passing categories between blogs, this is just amazing.
What happens is if you are viewing all posts on one blog within a category, you can then go to the blogroll of that blog and launch to another blog, and it won’t just go to the home page, it will go to the same category page as the blog that you were just on…great for discovery

…of course all blogs on the blogroll have to have the same category hack installed, and use the same categories, unless there is a way for the code to decide on the closest or most similar category via a synonym ring of some sort.

What an idea…so now you can not only view like posts from tags in the blogosphere (Technorati Tags), but you can also view like posts from tags in your blogroll or network.

Now this got me thinking, at the end of every blog post I could list my Technorati Tags, but also list my blogroll or network tags.

Here’s what the end of my blog post would look like (for Technorati I’m point to the general tag level, and not the user tag level for this example):

Technorati Tags: tagging, blogs, technorati

Network Tags: tagging, blogs, technorati

For the network tags I wouldn’t use the rel=”tag” part as they are being picked up by the Corante Web Hub anyway.

On my sidebar I could have my user tag cloud from Technorati, and my network tag cloud from the Corante Web Hub

…but it wouldn’t be like the tag cloud on the home page of the Corante Web Hub, it would only include the tags I use on my blog, the idea is that when you click on one you can see my posts within that tag, and other posts from the network that use that tag…so what Technorati does for the blogosphere, I would be doing at the network level.
I could also maybe use Technorati to do this…imagine if you could view Technorati Tags just according to the Corante Web Hub OPML file…then I could also use this tag cloud as well on my sidebar.

In this case at the end of my blog post I would list the Technorati Tags pointing to my user level tag, then the Technorati page could say “Search your OPML”, “Search all blogs”

…you could maybe change the “Search your OPML”, to “Search Corante Web Hub blogs”…and it would be good if you weren’t just limited to one, but be able to load as many OPML’s as you like.

This is more a wish than a prediction but I am betting that there will be one killer search engine for all the social bookmark services, someone to do for bookmarks what Technorati does for blogs.

So far we have a lot of meta-search tools:
Gada.be
GutenTag
Tag Central
Tagbert

Wink is the only tool that is merging the results but how are they ranked is the question.

What you’d think happens is that the item that has been bookmarked the most in all services with that tag will get top ranking and so on…I guess this is TagRank.
They could also mix in a Google link search and Technorati Link search to the tweak the ranking I guess, but the idea of just pure Tag Rank is good I suppose.

For each result set a link to the tag in all the services would be good, and as Wink already does, is listed related tags.
What about common tags for each item in the results from each service…this is extending the search to discovery…and/or common tags for the result set.

Since this is a human indexed web, what about being able to search full-text, the relevancy and ranking would be something similar to Google’s Page Rank with some of the TagRank thrown in

…the results would suggest looking in various tags, or see results in clusters.

This way we could have a human indexed web (less noise) that is searchable by full-text (relevancy/ranking a la PageRank and TagRank), or search via tag (relevancy/ranking according to TagRank)…like subject searching on an OPAC, as well as full-text searching.

So far the closest service has been Zniff, but this is just for the Spurl service…if all the services were combined this would be a powerful and cleaner search engine, that enables to limit search to a subject category.

Ohh, I forgot, there also has to be full-text search within a tag
…these refined results could again be based on a type of PageRank.

Speaking of refining, when you search for a tag, a list of intersecting tag could be available to refine your results, also boolean tag searching would be great…just check out Simpy for great searching features.

So who’s it gonna get into this risky game.

Imagine doing a link search on your blog domain to see which posts and how many times they have been bookmarked by the various services, and what tags people used to describe/file your various posts.

Here are some of my earlier posts:
What is the tagosphere?
Folksonomy: search vs. browse
Social bookmarks vs. free text search
Tagging alone is not a panacea for retrieval!

So the next time you search wouldn’t it be great to be able to choose the result set based on PageRank or TagRank.

[ADDED 22/02/06: rel8r]

Technorati have added new features…the search results now have a user link, clicking on this will take you to the users Technorati Profile, from here you can click on a tag from the tag cloud where you will see posts from one tag from the one blog.

I wonder if there is a way to limit a search in Technorati Tags to one blog (I mean it’s all there now)…IceRocket is on the game.

What about a link to the whole tag cloud…and some code for your sidebar…

Also, every item in the results page has 2 icons: one to see incoming links for the post, the other to refine the search to just that blog…I’ve got to say Technorati is looking super of late, and is super fast…good on ya guys!

Actually there’s more, depending on your search different labels appear in a tabbed format, so if you search for Gadgets, this of course is searching in all Blogs, but clicking on a tab will refine the search to blogs about: Technology, Apple, Tech, IPod, Hardware, Music…this is a great use for the Technorati Blog Finder data.

They are also handy widgets on the sidebar, one is keyword trends…DataMining has more.

Phil Bradley’s I want to guide has been extended, there is also a blog to keep up with the latest.

There are so many ways to make these type of lists: webpage, wiki, blog, bookmarks, outline…for me this seems like a type of classic link blog.

The quickest way would be to bookmark each resource in a social bookmark manager, add a comment, and have that RSS feed re-syndicated to a blog
…or even just be content with the bookmark manager as the portal, but I suppose the blog format is going to be more noticable.

Reminds me how Emily Chang posts.