Most of us are aware of the problem. If I tag this post ‘web2.0’ and you monitor Technorati for the tag ‘web20’ then we’re sunk. You’ll never find me. If I tag a webpage on del.icio.us as ‘hacks’ and you monitor the page for ‘hack’, you may never see it. These tags are virtually synonymous, but a computer can’t tell that.
Enter Tagging, a new Ning app designed to solve this very problem. The app stores groups of virtually synonymous tags (or TagGroups) that are defined by the community and provides easy access to them via both XOXO and JSON(P) APIs. With space to clearly define and describe TagGroups and a coComment catch-all discussion system the community solves their own problem by defining for the system what tags mean the same thing.
For more information see the Tagging About Page.
4 Responses
Hi! Good work, good come in good use for lazy people or tagaholics! 🙂
But one problem. The call to the API is returning an entire page, not just a function. Try this –>
Test Call
Nice call! I’ve fixed that now 🙂
I was thinking Yahoo’s “related tag” api might be useful for populating the app with synonyms.
How wrong I was. Turns out the service is largely useless.
http://api.search.yahoo.com/MyWebService/V1/relatedTags?appid=YahooDemo&tag=web&results=20&output=json
Anyone know of any good webservice thesauri?
Personally, I think it’ll would be much more useful if it used siblings as well as synonymous tags. Synonyms don’t generate as much interest as siblings do, IMHO.
@Greg: Yahoo!’s services are pretty much useless, except for Maps maybe. If only google gave out JSON feeds for their services, life would be so much easier! But we have Stephen’s app for that too!
I don’t a good thesaurus, but this could be turned into one with enough effort, don’t you think?