Taggle: Federated Search of Tagged Data

Brian Dear, the secret event entrepreneur,  has an interesting post about using "tags" as the new metadata. I actually had this conversation with Hjalmar of Spurl and Shimon of Frassle at our Boston Geek Lunch.  Spurl is approaching (or has) approached 1M spurls (ie bookmarks) and del.icio.us must be similarly numerated.  Flickr uses tags.  And more and more sites are starting to use them.

When searching for a web based css-designer the other day, I started at google and had much better luck searching spurl and del.icio.us. 

So, Brian's call for a federated search tool that searches all of this user defined metadata (tags) is a damn good one.   

And at this point is when the bookmarking tools begin to monetize and cash out.  Good for them.

Update 1/04/05:

duh! taggle = Blogdigger.

And John Battelle likes this idea.

And a comment on Battelle's searchblog by tonx: 

I keep wondering when the spammers will start exploiting the usefulness of this sort of metadata, posting ads and phony links disguised as good info. I understand flickr has already had to fend off something like this.

Reminds me of this fiasco written up by Clay Shirky, where he describes how the openness of systems create value, but also create incentive to spam.

Comments

[Greg Gershman]

Peter, did you know that Blogdigger indexes by tags/categories/subjects? We combine all the tag metadata and make it searchable with the subject: prefix. We also list the tags for each search result returned on any search. As an example, here's a search for the tag "tags" - http://blogdigger.com/search.jsp?q=subject%3Atags&sortby=date

[Brian Dear]

"Secret events entrepreneur?" Geez. Peter, you've been listening to Marc Canter too much. :-)