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September 11, 2005

Comments

Bob Wyman

There is a tremendous difference between the "First-person" in-content tagging that Technorati promotes and the "Third-Person" tagging that del.icio.us, furl, and others promote. The biggest difference is in the motivation of the tagger. An author, who tags in the first-person (i.e. "I wrote about..."), is primarily interested in attracting an audience and only secondarily interested in the "accurate" tagging of posts. On the other hand a third-person tagger ("He wrote about...") typically doesn't care about the size of the author's audience. A third-person tagger is much more likely to be primarily interested in using tags as a way to organize information.

The problem, of course, is that potential readers and searchers are much more aligned with the interests of third-person taggers than they are with the authors' first-person motivations. Given this difference, third-person tagging will inevitably result in much better results than first-person tagging.

bob wyman

pete caputa

Very well said, Bob!

I am thinking about the list. I was hoping it would be DIY, so I wouldn't have to do it all at once.

I am thinking Pete Caputa's list of cronies, which would be all the bloggers that I scheme (or collaborate) with.

Greg Gershman

I think Bob is mostly right, with one exception. I categorize all my blog posts, but I don't do it for T'rati, I do it mostly for myself. It's done in much the same fashion that I would use delicious. The problem is, not everyone uses categorization in this way...delicious, etc., is a much cleaner and efficient way to get this done.

This kind of stats stuff sounds like something we should add to our Groups app, which is DIY. And I hope I make it onto your list of cronies!

pete caputa

You are definitely on the list, Greg.

The stats would be very cool if you added it to your groups. Does pubsub have an API for that stuff? (I assume you have similar data, but I imagine Pubsub's index covers a bit more of the blogosphere?)

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