TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Another Tag Silo - Twitter Hashtags

A few days ago, I riffed on how the failure of user-powered tagging was what was driving the need for a semantic web - that jumbled, discontiguous tagging implementations had created a plethora of tag city-states who’s inability to talk on a “national” level had reduced the tagging movement to a curiosity.

Today, another entrant in the form of Hashtags - tags for twitter post. Again, useful within the silo of the twitter-verse, but clunky to extend outwards. You can read more on hashtags via stoweboyd, or stephanie booth, or check out full coverage.

The stated purpose of hashtags is to all one to follow a topical twitter-stream, as was useful for those techies fleeing the SoCal fires this past year. But how much cooler would it be if you could stitch together Twitter content, Flickr coverage, posted videos, blog posts, and news, into a single realtime view of a given situation? That would look a lot like the output of a semantic application.

To do so now would require onerous hard-coding of proprietary hooks into each services API (twitter, flicker, youtube, etc.), with more custom coding to parse out time and geo-relevance data. As I mentioned in my previous article, a two-tiered tagging system composed of machine and human tags, shared in a consistent format, and conforming to common baseline standards would enable this.

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!