Nevertheless, there are also a number of benefits for event planners and group leaders. In the past the hashtag has been used to track event conversation and even field questions from an audience. Now instead of displaying a scrolling Twitter feed on a trade show screen, a group can simply pull up their Facebook page and all of the in-Facebook @ tags as well as media uploads will automatically populate the page wall. This is a great way to gather up scattered conversation and keep the momentum going for inspiring events. Look for the new feature to roll out incrementally in the next couple of weeks.

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

Is This Really Web 3.0?

Zigtag may be one of the first tools to step out of the Web 2.0 box. Where "Web 2.0" implies there is a social element to a service, it's generally speculated that Web 3.0 will bring about the intelligent web. Zigtag delivers this intelligence, but is it enough?

The only downside to Zigtag is that it requires you, the user, to manually insert the tags. In fact, it even relies on user-generated tagging and has built its entire service around that concept. That may be where Zigtag went wrong. Although two years ago, what it offered was ground-breaking and unique, as we enter 2009, we're asking the question: "Is tagging dead?"

At first, collaborative tagging, also known as a folksonomy, appeared to be the future of the web. It was a rejection of the search engine in favor of the community. It was our collective intelligence harnessed for the purpose of applying meaning and order to the pieces of the web in ways that computer-based tools could not.

As time went on, though, the one thing that made a folksonomy appealing - it was made by people! - was also the very thing that gave it problems. User-generated tags were likely to produce unreliable results. Zigtag addresses that problem, but it does not address what may end up being the true source of failure for folksonomy-based systems: people are lazy.

Now that there are myriads of services using tagging, thanks to the explosion of Web 2.0, we're getting sick of all the manual labor involved. Tag your links, tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your RSS feeds, etc.

While at one time, a semantic-based tagging system like Zigtag may have seemed like a vision of Web 3.0, we've now come to a point where we wonder if it does enough. It's possible the next revolution of the web won't be a system that understands the meaning of the tags we created, but knows how we would have tagged things if we had bothered to do so and then does it for us. And if that's not the future of the web...well...perhaps it should be.

The objective of the VideoTagGame is to collect time-based annotations of the video which could then enable the retrieval of relevant parts in a video when a search is performed, rather than returning the entire video itself. These annotations are collected in the context of a multi-player game.

How To Play

To play the VideoTagGame, participants must sign in with their Yahoo! ID and join a new game. There will always be at least three players in each game. After a 3-second countdown, the video will begin to play. As it plays, participants enter tags that correspond to the various parts of the video. When two players agree on a tag (that is, they enter the same tag), they each get points. The closer together the tags were entered, the more points are rewarded. After the video ends, participants can then watch as it plays again, this time with the tags overlaid on top of the video.

The game, like Google Image Labeler, can be both fun and challenging for those involved. Think it sounds easy? Don't be fooled - the other participants are often fast typers capable of of entering nearly a hundred tags during a couple minutes of footage.

The VideoTagGame is a fun time-waster for those who like to play online games. It's similar to the games at the site Gwap ("games with a purpose"), launched by Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, as it uses "the human processor," too. Like the GWAP games, the end result of the VideoTagGame is the possibility of enabling new technology for searching within videos...or your name at the top of the scoreboard...whichever one sounds more exciting to you.

For the marketer, this is an quick way to quickly push a message to wide group of people. Tag 20 friends, and through the friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) network, you could easily reach thousands.

According to AdAge, photos are an ideal vehicle for marketers for three reasons. Sam Lessin writes, "First, people love them and tend to click on them all the time. Second, they get incredible real estate in news feed. Third, any message put into photos has a strange automatic relevance because it is attached to the name of a friend. Finally, there is a huge curiosity factor as to why a friend is tagged in an image."

What's worse is that he concludes the article by encouraging people to use this new method of promotion. Yikes! We absolutely hate this idea and hope that Facebook figures out a way to stop this marketing loophole before news feeds get filled with spam.

Photo courtesy of Facebook

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.

We also want to take this opportunity to thank the Delicious team and especially now post-Yahoo founder Joshua Schachter, for making this awesome service what it is. We really appreciate it.

First, an Introduction

Thanks to CommonCraft for another great video.

And Now for Something New

The following video demonstrated five of our favorite ways to use Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey to radically change the Delicious experience. This is really easy to do, as you'll see, and we've included all the links below the video. With just a handful of clicks you can integrate Delicious into sites like Google Reader and Digg, you can sort and view Delicious in brand new ways, and make a number of other changes.

Note that there's no audio in this video, we just went through the steps. We hope that's ok for readers but if you'd prefer it be narrated, let us know.

Links shown in the screencast:

Greasemonkey

Delicious for google reader

Sort by popularity or other

digg.licio.us

subscribe in delicious

Favicious

Autopagerize

Now, every feed page on Toluu will show a "Tags" tab. This tab displays all the tags other users have already attached to the feed, as well as a text box to immediately start entering tags. Toluu also suggests tags based on a user's previous behavior on the site. The experience is reminiscent of tagging bookmarks in delicious, where the Ajax interface also makes adding suggested tags as easy as clicking on the keyword.

Besides this, Toluu has gone out of its way to expose these new features in as many places as possible. When browsing through a list of feeds, for example, a little '+' sign appears next to every feed you mouse over, which then exposes an inline tagging interface.

Searching Tags

Because tags are now available on Toluu, the developers have also added the ability to search the complete index of all feeds in Toluu for a specific tag, which is a great way to discover new and interesting feeds to subscribe to.

Overall, we think Toluu did a great job in adding this new feature and making it easily accessible throughout the site. As the tagging feature is still pretty new, only a select few feeds actually have tags attached to them, but as more users start tagging feeds, this will surely become one of the most popular features on Toluu.

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.

Now, the Flash splash screen? I'd go to that funeral in my dancing shoes.

[Ed: readers are encouraged to ignore the RWW tag cloud, located in our sidebar, for this post.]

Top image credit: ocean.flynn

When you're reading any item from a particular feed, you'll notice thumbs up/thumbs down buttons at the top for voting and a button that keeps track of how many votes a particular post has received. There's also an option to email the article to a friend or bookmark it for yourself.

Viewing a Post on FeedzZ

However, what's really interesting are the tags at the bottom of the post. These tags aren't generated by people, but by the underlying semantic technologies. For example, our recent post "Watch Out Silicon Valley: Here Comes NYC" was tagged: new york michael bloomberg internet week web-oriented technologies seed-stage technology fund. There's also a "related entries" link which displays a list of posts with at least one of the same tags. In this example, thanks to the tag "New York," there were several unrelated entries listed here, but there was also a link to an article about the NYC Seed Fund. So in this case, the more accurate results came from just viewing the "internet week" tag.

In addition to the tags on each post, every page of FeedzZ has an automatically generated, semantically created tag cloud on the left which you can use to see all the posts about a particular subject (Example: Bill Gates).

Issues With FeedzZ

Of course, these related entries and tags could become infinitely more useful if you were to upload your own OPML file. Unfortunately, for true feed junkies that's probably something that will have to wait, since FeedzZ currently imposes a limit on OPML file sizes, restricting them 100 KB or less. (At 142 KB for my subscription list, I was out of luck).

FeedzZ is certainly an interesting experiment in semantics, but that being said, the site still needs a lot more finesse to really be successful. The OPML restriction is only one of the issues. Even if you manage to get your OPML uploaded, it's difficult to determine how to proceed with the data you've imported. You have to find your way into your profile section (no link is provided) and then you have to create a folder structure and classify your feeds. Shouldn't a semantic system know where the feeds belong? When I tried this, I couldn't even classify my feeds manually. Although I clicked the "Classify" button, there was never a feed in the drop-down list to select (see below), so I couldn't proceed. It's as if that piece of the web site was not even built yet.

Attempting to Classify a Feed

These types of issues are major problems in terms of usability, so it's hard to truly recommend the site at this time. However, if these problems were resolved, FeedzZ could then have a shot at being a useful online feed aggregator or even a great research tool for finding related news items on the topics that interest you. It's great that FeedzZ has managed to get the semantic RSS technologies working, but now they need to turn their attention to the user experience and UI design so we all can appreciate their efforts.

Faviki's backend uses DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting structured info from Wikipedia and turning that into a database which you can query. (You can read our previous coverage on DBpedia here).

This means that instead of just being words, the tags in this data model become references to objects which are categorized automatically. An example from the Faviki blog cited an example using the tag "Coca-Cola." An item you tagged with this concept would actually reference the unique URL http://dbpedia.org/data/Coca-Cola (the tag is the last part of that URL). Under other tagging systems, the same item may have been tagged with cocacola, coca-cola, coca+cola, CocaCola, but in Faviki, it's simply "Coca-Cola." And because the tags structure is already emanating from the largest collection of concepts in the world - Wikipedia - their format is already standardized and agreed upon by the community.

Using Faviki

Despite Faviki's lofty goals, it's just as easy to use as any other bookmarking service. Once you sign up, you can install a browser bookmarklet which you can use to save links and tag them. You can also search your tags or click through the site's tag cloud to view some of the most popular saved links from the Faviki community.

A Search on Faviki

Unfortunately, there is no way to import your bookmark collection from another service. This is probably because doing so would necessitate completely re-tagging every link-  that would certainly require too much effort on the part of a user if it was a manual process and I imagine it's also difficult to create a service that would automatically scan each link and tag it appropriately. However, without this option, it will be hard to get users to completely switch over from whatever service they are using now.

What Problem Faviki Solves

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

There has been a lot of discussion around this topic lately. At the recent Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, predicted that over the next 10-15 years, tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web, while keywords disappear.

If that turns out to be true, then Faviki represents a big step in that direction by offering a transitional service between social bookmarking and a purely semantic-based bookmarking service that would automatically know how to tag any content saved by discovering the semantic aspects already associated with that web page.

Grossman's plugins, which are available as an auto tagger and an archive tagger (to go back and tag old posts), received over 500 downloads in the first two days. The plugins work by sending post text to Calais and retrieving a list of suggested tags. The plugins rely on an Open Calais PHP class, also written by Grossman. Eventually, the plugins will be released under a Creative Commons license. Grossman tells us he's waiting until the next Calais feature update, scheduled for May 1st, before adding any more features to his plugins.

As we've noted, because of Calais' roots as Clearforest the rules it applies while parsing text are biased toward the language of business. That means that business or tech bloggers will likely find more utility in Calais for the time being. If you're writing about Fortune 500 companies, the Calais Wordpress Auto Tagger plugin might be very useful, but if you routinely write about sewing teddy bears, though, its usefulness might be dubious.

Unfortunately for Grossman, the application deadline for the $5000 bounty passed in March and Reuters has since farmed out the work of creating a Wordpress plugin to a commercial firm. Though work on that plugin continues, we're told that people at Calais have expressed interested in working with Grossman on future Calais-related projects. Open Calais is one of the most interesting new semantic APIs, and we're keen to see developers finally start to embrace it and make some useful mashups.

On the other hand, the top-down approach that we discussed does not place any burden on content owners and delivers instant benefits to end users. Yet, the top-down tools run into a difficulty - interpreting raw information is not that simple. Typical solutions focus on a vertical, but still suffer from imperfections.

What if there was some minimal annotation in the content to help top-down tools interpret it? In this post we look at how content owners can implement simple annotation strategies which can help the top-down tools and search engines to make the web more structured.

Annotation Basics - Headers

It is striking how many sites today do not use meta tags in the head of the document to provide the bare minimum information about a page's content. Forget building a smarter web, this is just plain bad SEO practice. The work that is being put into generating great content can be offset by lack of a succinct, meaningful description of that content. Every page on the web should have the following information filled in:

• title - a sentence briefly describing the site/page
• description - a paragraph about the site/page
• keywords - a list of keywords that describe the site/page

Note that it makes sense to provide different information for the root page and subsequent pages. For example, for a newspaper or a blog, the root page should provide information about the site at large, while individual article and post pages should contain information about that specific page, not the overall site.

The New York Times' web site provides a good example of how to properly use meta tags. For example, this article on Slowdown in US Growth includes the following meta data:

• title - U.S. Growth Slowed Drastically in 4th Quarter
• description - The economy expanded by a weak 0.6 percent in the latest indication of a substantial slowdown and perhaps a recession.
• keywords - United States Economy,Gross Domestic Product

The New York Times is actually a great example of taking the basics of annotation and building on top of them. Each page includes an extended set of rich meta data including, the author of the article, the date it was published, thumbnail image URL, creator, category and even ticker symbols for public companies that are mentioned in the article. Certainly, the New York Times provides a really great set of information, perhaps even wider than needed for most content, but lets focus on the ones that should be used on a wider scale.

author: Web content is produced by people and for people. With the rise of social culture we are increasingly interested in finding bits of everyone's identity around the web. If something piqued your interest enough for you to blog or to write an article, at least you can put your name on it. Having people attached to content would allow seamless navigation from one to another. There is already a standard meta tag for this, with a suggestive name: author.

thumbnail: We love pictures. Since the launch of Flickr we can't live without them. Facebook's success owes a lot to photo sharing. With bandwidth becoming cheap, we are increasingly become more visual. We do not want text we want pictures, so if a news article or blog post contains an image, it is simple to do what the Times did - generate a meta tag for it. There is no standard meta as far as I know, but any of these would do: thumb, image, picture, thumbnail, etc.

date: As we are becoming a real-time culture the freshness of content becomes paramount. Tagging the page with date is important way of helping classify the page in time. Most blog posts and articles contain dates anyways, and having a standard date header would make it simple and obvious.

location: Location is becoming increasingly more important as well. With GPS and widely available Internet access we are able to easily let people know where we are and are able to take advantage of local services. If the article or a post is related to a specific location there is a conventional way of annotating it. The technical term for annotating content with location information is Geotagging. It generally means placing a pair of latitude and longtitude coordinates. A more relaxed form would be specifying country/region/city and is described in detail by the Geo microformat specification. While specifying exact position coordinates may be difficult, even something as simple as the geo header New York, NY would be very helpful.

Tags in Blog Posts

The concept of tagging, which was popularized by services like del.icio.us and Flickr, is now commonly understood and is ubiquitous. The idea of humans tagging content to categorize it and later to find it is a simple, yet important bit of the web infrastructure. Most major blogging platforms support tags. The tags are standardized based on the rel-tag microformat. You can see the implementation on ReadWriteWeb - each post is tagged with a set of tags.

For example, one of our recent posts contains this tag:
<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/tag/twitter" rel="tag">twitter</a>
The tag has several benefits:

• Readers can instantly click to find other posts with this tag
• Search engines can better classify the content
• Semantic tools can offer additional services such as finding related content, pictures, and video

Tags are similar in principle to keywords, but provide more flexibility because they are inside the post and can have richer content. In principle, it could be possible to add more information into the keywords meta tag in the head of the document but it has existed in its current form for several decades and is thus probably not likely to change. In any case, all modern blogging platforms make it trivial to tag content, so there should be no excuses.

Standardizing Blog Templates Across Platforms

In the nineties people created web sites. These days only companies have web sites, individuals have blogs and social network profiles. There is a great opportunity to standardize and structure the information because blogs and profiles are based on templates. Consider a common structure for each blog. One or a few sidebars and the central area for the content. In the content area, on a post page there is a post body, date, author and tags - a minimum set of elements.

Why not standardize on a few things here?

• <div class="post"> - a container for the post body
• <div class="sidebar"> - a container for the sidebar
• <div class="author"> - a container for the author
• <div class="date"> - a container for the date
• <div class="tags"> - a container for the tags
• <div class="comments"> - a container for the comments

Platforms already do have very similar things in place and standardizing between them is rather simple. In no way would this be a competitive advantage or disadvantage to them, but it would be a big help towards making the web more structured. Extending on these basics, it would also be helpful if widgets were wrapped into standard enclosures. A simple widget tag can go a long way toward distinguishing widgets from the other content in the sidebar.

If blogging platforms standardized on these basic conventions, likely major newspapers would follow as well.

The situation with social network profiles is different, as the information contained in them is not public. In addition, there is a competitive advantage to Facebook in having its own proprietary structure. However, entities like the DataPortability group have been created precisely to deal with this problem and Facebook just joined. So we may yet seem some progress on that front.

Beyond Basics - Microformats

The annotations that we discussed up to now are very basic and would a require minimum amount of work from newspapers, bloggers, and blogging platforms to deploy. The advantage of them is that they are simple to implement but would deliver big bang for the buck. Yet, these are primitive ways to annotate content. The next step is to use bottom-up technologies like microformats, which offers a way to embed objects into HTML documents in a compact way.

Microformats have been around for a few years and have certainly caught the attention of some. Several major services are using microformats. For example, Flickr is using the geo microformat and headers to geotag photos. Eventful uses the hCal format to describe meta data for each event. Blogger pages contain hCards for each blogger. But the problem is that there needs to be more and better integration of microformats into the blogging platforms. For example, coming back to the Blogger hCard, right now, most of them are not useful because they do not require people to fill in information and just generate the card based on the login. This is more harmful than good as semantic tools can not take advatange of such cards and they do not look good to people either.

Similarly, there is not much support for geotagging photos and event microformats in the platforms. But even beyond the lack of support, the limitation of the current microformat specs is that they do not cover the basic range of things that people discuss on the web - books, music, movies, recipes, and restaurants are all noticibly absent (the existing hReview microformat does not have a way to express the type of the object or the attributes).

But it does look like with a bit of a push on both the community behind the microformat specs and blogging platforms we could see microformats becoming a major way of annotating information inside blog posts. This would be a welcomed development and would allow a large subset of the web - the blogosphere - to become quite structured.

Conclusion

The vision of the structured web is big and compelling and at the same time is hard to attain. At times, it is difficult to see how we can ever get there. But on some days we think that even if the web could be just a tiny bit more structured it would become so much more connected. And so in this post we considered a set of very basic bottom-up techniques that newspapers, bloggers, and blogging platforms can put in place to make the web more structured.

Putting meta information into page headers is easy and should be a must-do thing for everyone. Beyond that, providing information such as author, date, and location makes data that much more valuable. And if blogging platforms could also standardize on the key elements of the pages, crawlers and intelligent browsing tools could do a better job making sense of the content. Beyond that, microformats are the front runner in annotating the web with meta information about things, but they still need more pushing and effort.

What do you think about these basic structures? Are you going to fix up your blog after reading this post? What other things should we push to standardize on?

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.

It was naturally a quiet news week, being the first week of 2008. But the Web had a significant part to play in the US Presidential primaries, which kicked off this week in Iowa. Josh Catone wrote pre-Iowa that if the web were an indicator of political results, then Ron Paul and Barack Obama would likely be squaring off in the US presidential elections next November. But with the first state contest out of the way, it looks like the web was only half right (any maybe didn't have much to do with it at all). Obama, who was in a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards according to pre-caucus polls, convincingly defeated his rivals. Paul, however, finished fifth - exactly where he was polling - and still no where near the winner, Mike Huckabee, who collected 34% of the vote to Paul's 10%.

Trends

What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008

This is a MUST READ post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, in which he outlines 5 big topical trends in Web Technology in 2008. He also provides the following resources:

* An OPML file of top blogs on each subject. This is a bundle of feeds you can import into your reader.
* A filtered RSS feed of just the most popular items regarding each topic (using AideRSS). Remember, whenever you subscribe to new RSS feeds - some of the magic won't be visible until you mark all the initial items as read and new ones come in again.
* A Custom Search Engine that you can bookmark and use to search inside the top news and reference sites regarding each topic.

5 Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again

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!

Marshall stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for his own future reference wasn't enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, he's 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.

Related: The Glory, Bliss and How-to of Screen Scraping for RSS

Is it Time to Declare Music Downloads a Loss Leader?

Radiohead's widely heralded experiment with free downloads plus a premium package and request for donations (effectively) remains shrouded in mystery, but Trent Reznor and Saul Williams released some numbers this week about a similar experiment. Those numbers indicate that very few people want to pay for recorded music these days.

Related: Threatened by the Internet? Music Biz Should Rock Like Librarians

Web Products

Songbird To Build Out Music Power-Browser

Songbird is a desktop music player Marshall been using lately instead of iTunes and he's really been enjoying it. Based at core on Mozilla technology, this week the company kicked off a 6 week campaign to build the 40 most-requested Firefox extensions for Songbird. This big burst of functionality could put Songbird over the edge as a music-lover's dream-come-true, though it's pretty close already.

Author Uses Amazon Kindle to Beta Test New Book

In his former occupation as a programmer at Microsoft, Daniel Oran developed the "start" button for the Windows 95 taskbar. As an author about to publish his second novel, Oran continues to innovate, this time by using the recently released Amazon Kindle e-book reader to let early readers help him refine a draft of his latest book. Oran's use of the Kindle is one of the more interesting we've seen, and really demonstrates the device's read/write potential.

Related: Yahoo! PDF Ads In the Wild on Kevin Kelly's Latest Book

RWW Network Blogs

last100

On our Digital Lifestyle blog last100, the big news this week was Sony BMG’s decision to, in part, ditch DRM and start selling tracks on Amazon MP3 without copy-protection. That makes four out of four, with Sony BMG joining the other major labels: EMI, Universal Music and Warner (as predicted in last100's Digital Music 2007 year in review). In a follow up post, Daniel Langendorf asked where this leaves Apple’s iTunes Store?

On the Internet TV front, Netflix made a splash with its announcement of a partnership with LG to deliver movies over the Internet directly to a TV.

In their main feature-post this week titled ‘Mobile: the Year of Wireless hasn’t arrived — yet‘, last100's Dan Langendorf took a hard look at the changing face of the mobile industry (particularly in the U.S.), calling 2007 part of the transition years — with much bigger changes yet to come this year and realized in 2009.

AltSearchEngines

This week on AltSearchEngines, there were two interesting sets of posts: the first was a pair of very telling posts about vertical search engines. The message: verticals are no longer "gaining strength," they have now arrived.

Also this week ASE investigated ChaCha - with a review of ChaCha's mobile launch, followed by Natalya Murakhver's interview with ChaCha CEO Scott Jones.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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.

Dapper is a company founded in Israel, now venture backed and was named in the aforementioned Wired article. It is the sweetness.

Dapper will let you pull data from almost any web page and get it in a wide variety of outputs, including RSS, email, iCal, a Google Gadget, CSV and Google Maps. Is that incredible or what?

Let's let the video do that talking. I have an awful cold (it's almost better, Mom!) so please excuse the very rough voice. I made the following screencast using JingProject, setting up an RSS feed of search results in Del.icio.us for articles tagged from ReadWriteWeb.

Clicking on the image below will open up another window so you can view the 4 minute video full screen.

If you're as excited about Dapper as I am, you should check out DapperCamp, a two day free conference all about Dapper coming up in early February in San Francisco. IBM and Mindtouch are sponsoring the event and Mitch Kapor is keynoting it. It looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.

Take that, Wired Mag ambivalence! Really, though, you should read that Wired article - it's a good one that discusses some issues that are going to be very big once more people figure out how exciting data portability is.

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.

The inspiration for this post came from social media aficionado Tim Bonnemann's practice of tagging all the words he looks up online with the tag "dictionary." At the end of the year, he posted the full list of links to his blog. What a great way to deepen recall of the things you've learned!

2. Build a collaborative tag stream for a community of practice

One of the best things about tagging URLs is that all kinds of RSS feeds become available. One community of practice, a loose group of nonprofit technologists, uses the tag "nptech" to mark items of interest in del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, youtube and elsewhere. The feeds for nptech items in all of these services are then combined into one NPtech metafeed.

That makes a good community news feed, but it can be taken even further. At one point as many as 2000 people were using the tag nptech - that can be a lot of information. Consultant Beth Kanter now publishes a summary of each week's highlights from the Nptech feed over at NetSquared.

3. Create a shared items feed and put it on your web page

Many of our readers probably use the shared items feature in Google Reader. That service continues to grow more sophisticated - last week it added any shared items feeds from your Gmail contacts to your list of subscribed feeds, for example.

While that's pretty hot - there's something to be said for baking your own, too. If you tag items something like "toshare" in a service like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia then you can share URLs that you find outside of Google Reader and you can switch feed readers/tagging services without loosing all your shared items subscribers.

I did this on my personal blog this year by taking the feed from my items tagged "toshare" in del.icio.us and running it through the service FeedDigest. There I got a PHP snippet to display my links and notes on the sidebar of my blog (it's also live here in javascript on the right of this post, albeit a touch wonky with CSS). I also spliced the toshare feed together with my blog's feed (via FeedDigest) and ran the spliced feed through Feedburner. I then added a link to my sidebar offering my shared items + blog posts feed for subscription via Feedburner. Several hundred people have subscribed to get my links and knowing that someone else cares is a huge motivation to keep tagging things I find online. I open my bookmarking app to tag something "toshare" and while I've got it open I may as well give it a few other tags as well for better classification.

This winter I switched from Del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia for my social bookmarking and it was easy to replace the Del.icoi.us feed in FeedDigest with the Ma.gnolia feed. Nothing changed as far as Feedburner was concerned, it was still getting the same spliced feed URL - so all my subscribers are still getting my links.

If you're curious, by the way, the reasons I switched to Ma.gnolia include: OpenID login, a very active development team, engagement with the newest data standards like oAuth and APML, live customer support chat by Pibb IM (also with OpenID, RSS) and a couple of other very cool features. The user community there is quite impressive, too.

4. Tag into a mobile reader

In addition to tagging things "toshare" I've also taken recently to tagging items "toread" and pulling that feed into Netvibes. Netvibes has a great that's good for checking a small number of feeds in between full-reader sessions.

Adding my toread tag to Netvibes has made it easy for me to catch up on things I want to read while traveling around town. Sometimes I'll just read the most widely popular items from my toread feed, by running that feed through AideRSS and getting a new feed of the 20% of those items that were most tagged, Dugg, commented on and linked to. AideRSS can be applied on top of all of the methods on this list.

It's another way that I'm incentivized to open up that tagging interface more than I would be if I was only saving things for posterity. Now a searchable archive of key pages is available as a secondary consequence of tagging things toread and toshare.

5. Tag your microblog posts

If you think opening up del.icio.us to save something is more trouble than it's often worth, then I'm sure you'll agree that it can feel really overwhelming to compose an entire blog post! (I wrote about this once and got linked to by the BBC, whereupon I was promptly called a loser by snarky British readers for even bringing up the dilemma. "Blogging," one said, "is like wearing a coat that says I am Billy No Mates." That's the funniest insult I think I've ever received.)

ANYWAY, I know I'm not alone in finding it much easier to share information over Twitter than by blogging or tagging in a social bookmarking app. Enter Hashtags. Like tagging for Twitter, hashtags are terms you put after a # in a post. Hashtags.org then aggregates all the tweets using a given tag and publishes an RSS feed. Reading a feed of short messages sent from the #sandiegofires was very interesting, for example.

Though you can certainly just subscribe to a search feed through a service like Terraminds - Hashtags let you do all the things in microblogging that you can do using the methods described in numbers 1 through 4 above. See also Dave Sifry's new project Hoosgot - a service he calls the Lazyweb for the age of Twitter.

5 1/2 The future

In a future that leverage our Attention Data, we'll be able to tag things in order to influence our Attention Profiles. What does that mean? It means that once you've exposed your Ma.gnolia APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) to your Bloglines RSS reader - then you'll be able to influence the feeds that Bloglines recommends to you by tagging certain things in Ma.gnolia.

Perhaps you discover that you love reading African photoblogs but you don't know much about the field. Tag a few that you discover in Ma.gnolia and the next time you open up Bloglines it will notice that you've expressed a new interest and recommend some of the top African photoblogs in its giant feed database.

That future isn't terribly far off, in fact. Ma.gnolia already publishes a rudimentary APML file for each user and Bloglines has announced that it will support APML soon.

Conclusion

So tagging hasn't taken off like early fans thought it would - but it's still really useful. If we explore ways that it can provide tangible, short-term, personal value then we can score the long term, aggregate value as a result. I wish it weren't that way - but that's how I've found value in the practice myself.

So let's tag some terms we have to look up the definitions for this year! Please let readers here know about any other super cool tagging practices you've experimented with.