ReadWriteWeb

Facebook just launched status tagging for friends, pages, events and groups. The company has torn a page out of the Twitter playbook and plans to increase search functionality via the @ tag. Over the next few weeks Facebook users will be able to tag their friends, pages and groups in status messages. Similar to photo tagging, all those indicated in the tag will receive a notification. Said Facebook product manager Andrew Huang to Inside Facebook, "People use status updates to tell stories about real world experiences. This is about making the site more engaging."

It was two years ago that we first heard of Zigtag, a service that promised to "transform how people search, save and share knowledge & information." Now, after a nine-month private beta, this semantic tagging service has finally launched. But is Zigtag's bookmarking tool intelligent enough for 2009?

The transfer of human intelligence to the machine is something the internet makes easy to do. With reCAPTCHA, we keep spammers at bay while helping digitize old books, Amazon's Mechanical Turk lets us crowdsource small tasks to a dynamic human workforce available on demand, and Google Image Labeler makes the tedious task of tagging fun. Now Yahoo is trying to tap into that human machine through their new VideoTagGame, a game that encourages participants to tag sections within a video for better retrieval.

Has this happened to you? You receive a message on Facebook that you've been tagged in a photo, but when you go to look at the photo you discover that it wasn't you at all, but some sort of product, service, or cause that a marketer is trying to promote. According to news from AdAge, this is the latest in guerrilla marketing efforts making its way through Facebook right now. It's so slimy, we hesitate to even mention it here, lest we give anyone ideas.

Popular social bookmarking service Delicious says today is its 5th birthday. While this author was disappointing several years ago that it was Yahoo and not the Library of Congress that acquired the company, Delicious remains one of the most powerful and useful services on the web.

To mark its big day, we offer below two videos. The first an introduction to the tool for readers still unfamiliar and the second a screencast demonstrating just how easy and useful it is to make 5 changes to your Delicious experience. Those changes took us under 5 minutes.

The OPML sharing and matching service Toluu provides a great way to find and share interesting RSS feeds. One feature that had been missing so far, however, was tagging. In its latest update, which was released today, Toluu has made tagging one of the central features of the service, which will make finding new and interesting blogs through Toluu even easier.

I loved tag clouds from the moment I saw them, and I still do. Two years ago, they roamed the social web like buffalo on the pre-Columbian plains of North America... huge, thundering herds of keywords of all shades and sizes. And you'll see them to this day on many of their earliest adopters - from Delicious.com (makeover and all) to 43 Things.

These days, though, I'm noticing that on more and more sites the tag clouds have evaporated. I'm not saying they're dead (okay, granted, that's exactly what the cartoon's saying, but that's why they issue artistic licenses), but they're getting scarcer.

At first glance, the social news aggregation site called FeedzZ appears to nothing more that an Alltop clone with fewer categories. But look again - FeedzZ is actually doing something quite different than Alltop, OriginalSignal, Shyftr, or any other news aggregation web site - it's using the Calais API to offer a semantic component to the feed reading experience. This semantic technology is combined with Digg-like voting buttons and an online feed reader which you can use with your own OPML file, all of which lays the groundwork for a unique feed-reading experience.

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Open Calais, a semantic markup API from Reuters that we've written about on ReadWriteWeb before, has finally gotten the Wordpress plugin it has been looking for since January, when it started a bounty program seeking one. The new plugins come from developer Dan Grossman and represent one of the first public-facing applications of the API (as opposed to private uses like that of the Powerhouse Museum).

We have written a lot here about the the vision of building a structured layer on top of the current web. Annotating billions of HTML documents in a bottom-up way or building top-down tools that can automagically interpret the existing information are the two approaches that we discussed. Together these approaches would result in a global database which will make the web even more connected. The ability to correlate content and concepts accross web sites would reduce the time necessary for searching and would enable the discovery of related information.

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Highlights this week: Richard MacManus ended 2007 with a review of the top 10 Web Tech stories of the year. Marshall Kirkpatrick produced an awesome toolkit to keep track of Web Tech trends in 2008; he also showed how to fall in love with tagging again and asked some big questions on privacy in the Web age. Josh Catone offered a guide to Online Giving to start the new year and he explored how the Web is affecting the US presidential primaries.

Wired has an awesome top story today on the world of startups utilizing scraped data from big companies to offer new layers of value for their own users. It's a roughly objective piece that I highly recommend reading but it was also inspiration for me to finally record a screencast on the subject (see below).

I love RSS, probably more than anything on the web. If you're not familiar with the concept, see my very old definition of RSS and my almost-as-old post on teaching people about RSS.

Not every page on the web publishes an RSS feed, though. Thus the need for these wonderful screen scraping tools. I've written about a variety of tools you can use to create a feed for a site or page that doesn't have one. Sometimes, though, you've got to pull out the big guns. In those cases, it's time for Dapper.

Tagging content online is something that doesn't seem to have taken off the way some people expected it to.

Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer? Is it just too much work while you're zipping around the web? Who knows - what's important is that tagging web pages can still be very useful!

I stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for my own future reference wasn't enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, I've seen what some other people are doing to make it worthwhile again. Here's five and a half ways you can fall in love with tagging URLs again.