Tagging makes an awful lot of sense for content rich news sites like Infoworld. Its a great way to let users explore the information on the site without resorting to heavyweight navigation. Mayeb this is an advantage that traditional media like newspapers (with their sections) can't reproduce. Until now, I've been disappointed that traditional online media basically follow the newspaper format with stories in sections.
From: Joho the Blog
Matt McAlister explains that the Infoworld.com upgrade isn't merely cosmetic: On the articles pages they've moved from a fixed taxonomy that took them a lot of time to develop to a structured tagging system:
What I like most in this new architecture is that the related links are now driven by del.icio.us. Our edit team is tagging content in del.icio.us. The engineers are pulling down the del.icio.us RSS feeds. And then we create matching logic based on the common tags. We also link back out to del.icio.us pages via the tags for the article on display.
This is a first step with several more ideas for leveraging tags coming soon. We need a more densely tagged data set behind us before some of the other plans can become real. The accuracy of the related links will also be a little shady, I'm sure, until we get more sophisticated with our tagging. But we're all excited about the possibilities for the site now that we have these tags. New ideas seem to crop up daily.
Fascinating. Matt also talks about the intersection of tagging and marketing.
So, see Ephraim Schwarz's article on Oracle and Sybase offering RFID integration. To the right is a "See Also" box that lists the article's tags: Ephraim_Schwartz Oracle_RFID Sybase_RFID. (You can also click on "Complete List of Tags," which takes you to Infoworld's del.icio.us page.) The Oracle_RFID link takes you to the del.icio.us list of pages Infoworld has tagged as "oracle_RFID." It being de.licio.us, that page also shows all the articles every other del.icio.us user has tagged that way. (The fact that zero non-Infoworlders have used that tag to me means that it's a tad overly specific. Why not tag the article "oracle" and "rfid" instead?)
Meanwhile, the first mention of a company or technology in an Infoworld article is followed by three little links, one of which is "articles." It takes you to a list of articles about that company. That list is not coming from del.icio.us and seems (seems!) unrelated to the tagging scheme. I don't know if they're planning to switch over at some point.
I'm also not sure what it means that Infoworld is applying matching logic to del.icio.us feeds. Does that mean they're looking at tags from non-Infoworlders?
In any case, this is exciting because a high-traffic site that lives and dies by content is trusting the looser bonds of tagging to help us explore what's related. And if Infoworld is using del.icio.us to include related links outside of their site — even if they don't, because Infoworld is using del.icio.us we can do that for ourselves — then we have a great example of the social power of links: They owners of the information no longer are the sole proprietors of the organization of that information. [Technorati tags: tags infoworld folksonomy]
Link to article...
The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of the Firefox browser that addresses a number of security vulnerabilities including a well-publicized Javascript issue. The Mozilla Suite has also been updated (the new version is 1.7.7). eWeek has details on the vulnerability issues this release addresses.
