Blog categories <==> tags
By Tim Finin on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 2:57 pm.I was happy to see that Technorati now automatically maps from the category system in many common blog systems to tags:
“If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom (like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, Radio), just use the included category system and make sure you’re publishing RSS/Atom and we’ll automatically include your posts! Your categories will be read as tags.”
One might like to have tags that differ from the blog category system (e.g., finer grained), but I think this might give me 80% of what I want with virtually no effort. For example, here’s what Technorati has under the SemanticWeb tag. We’ll have to re-think our categories, add some new ones, and get in the habit of categorizing a posting more carefully.
Blog category systems, at least the one that comes with WordPress, are hierarchical. If the AI category has a subcategory MachineLearning, then all postings tagged with MachineLearning will show up when you look at the AI postings. So, we may have to do this manually in order to have that posting show up on Technorati under both tags, AI and MachineLearning.
Another problem is that the names in a category system are often chosen to make sense in the context of the hierarchy, differentiating the category from its parent, siblings and children. In a flat and more open tagging environment, there is no contextual information, so that the names have to carry all the weight.
Related posts: • On Blog categories <==> tags; • Technorati’s blog search service finds blogs, not posts; • ICWSM-2007 Weblog dataset released;
UMBC eBiquity Blog
March 10th, 2005 at 1:57 pm
Have you found this still to be the case? Over the last few weeks it doesn’t appear that Technorati is using the category element from the RSS anymore as tags?
March 17th, 2005 at 3:07 am
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