Head in the Cloud
April 5, 2006
There is already a conversation on how Folksonomy could help improve (internet) search. Part of the added value of using tags lies in its analysis by synthesis nature, as Wikipedia nicely puts it:
Perhaps the greatest benefit of folksonomy is its relevance in the information retrieval sense of the term — that is, the capacity of its tags to describe the “aboutness” of an Internet resource. After all, folksonomies are generated by people who have spent a great deal of time interacting with the content they tag. They know it far better than any outsider possibly could, even an outsider with controlled vocabulary expertise.
However it is not easy to choose good tags, when tagging or when searching by tag. Tag clouds are like visual thesaurus and a cloud of keyword/tag popping around your search keywords could help to make your choice of keywords ‘converge’ with those attached to the contents you are searching for. Wikio (still closed and in beta) tries to apply this idea, as revealed in TechCrunch:
And one of the most interesting aspects is the automatically generated tag cloud for each query that will help you extend your search intuitively. So if you run a search on TechCrunch it will lead you to web2.0 or blogs or podcasts……
Read the full review on TechCrunch » Will Wikio challenge Google News and Technorati?.
