The Hindu : Business : Aggregating tagged content

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 14, 2005

Business

Business

Aggregating tagged content

NETSPEAK TAKES a look at the new Net phenomenon of tagging content by netizens and also explores a service created for aggregating tagged content.

One of the unique features of the Net is that it enables even ordinary people to be content creators/distributors.

For instance, one can launch a blog and start expressing her views on anything that matters. You can join any of the public bookmark services and publish/share the latest sites being discovered by you. You can participate on on-line discussions and make your contributions.

An interesting feature of many of the on-line content generating systems like blogs and on-line bookmarking systems is that they provide the users the ability to label or tag the information being posted.

Most of the services allow a user to create her own categories. That is, while a blogger posts an entry into her blog, she can put the entry under a category of her choice.

So, if a netizen is doing research on a specific subject, say `genetic engineering,' whenever she comes across some information related to this subject, she can put it under the category `genetic engineering.'

And, if this data is created on a content sharing system like Furl, others with similar interests can not only use the data but can also populate content under this category. Some people call this classification of content by an ordinary netizen, using words of his choice, folksonomy (http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Folksonomy).

In fact, some experiments are already under way to collaboratively create content for specific subjects, using tags that have been agreed up on by the participants.

The NPTech experiment (http://ext337.blogspot.com/ 2005/02/nptech-experiment-description.html), stumbled on by this author recently, is an example of a project of this kind. The project aims to collect links of web sites that contain information regarding non-profit technology through the bookmark service `del.ici.ous,' using the tag `nptech.' The aggregated content for the tag, nptech is available at: http://del.icio.us/ tag/nptech.

The ability of creating sharable, tagged content assumes significance because of its potential to bring some order into the cyberspace, which is `suffering' from content explosion. What is happening here is the automatic categorisation of information by ordinary netizens across the Net through multiple on-line channels that include blogs, social bookmark services and tagged discussion boards like Tagsurf (http://tagsurf. com/).

However, as there is no specific rule to tag a data, it is likely that the same data get different tags and in this process we may miss out some information. Still, this decentralised data classification scheme might bring some order into the Net world.

As the tagged data is being stored on multiple Net locations, we need some mechanism that can collect various tags and the content stored on each of them from different on-line sources.

The Technorati's (http://www .technorati.com/) tag aggregation service is an attempt in this direction. As per its tag page (http://www.technorati.com/tag/), at the time of this writing, Technorati currently tracks around 359,055 tags.

The tags being tracked include the ones from blogs, del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) and Furl (http://furl.net).

When you access the service's tag page, you will find tags listed in alphabetical order. The size of a tag's label is a measure of the size of its content.

To access the content available under a tag, just click on its label. If you already know the tag, you can directly access the content with the link: http://www.technorati.com/tag/tag-name.

For instance, if you want to get the content being stored under the label `linux,' access the link: http://www.technorati. com/tag/ linux.

If you are a blogger and want to share your tagged content, you need to inform (ping) the service each time you create new content.

The steps to be followed are described here: http://www.technorati.com/help/tags. html.

Futuremail

Due to work pressure or indulgence in several activities, it is likely that you forget many simple but important events. A tool that can automatically remind us of specific events at the right time is an acute requirement.

The on-line service, `FutureMail' is one such product developed for this purpose.

The service helps you send mails to yourself anytime you like and "have them delivered on any date you choose.''

So, if you have to participate in an important business function, say after a month, you can send a reminder to yourself and the service will automatically deliver it exactly after a month on to your mailbox.

PDF converter

As mentioned in a previous edition of this column, text part of a PDF file can be extracted using the free tool Ghostscript/Gswin (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/). PDF converter of JoeSoftware (http://www. jsware. net/jsware/pdfconv.html) is another free tool that can be deployed for this purpose.

The highlight of this software is that it lets you invoke the converter directly from Windows Explorer. After the installation of the program, it will add the context menu option `Convert to Text' for PDF files. So, to extract text from a PDF file, access it using Windows Explorer, right-click on it and select the option `Convert to Text.'

Search services portal

This column has introduced several tools developed for helping netizens search the Net with ease

The web-based search application, Turboscout is another one of this type recently seen on the cyberspace. The product lets you access several search services from a single interface. In this context, you may also check out the search services portal Search Engines 2 that features links to several regional/specialised/general search engines, web directories and meta search engines.

MicroSoft press releases

Want to read MicroSoft press releases through your news aggregator? Check out the link: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/rss/ that hosts `Microsoft PressPass RSS Feeds'.

J. Murali

E-mail the author at: jmurali@gmail.com

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