Audio Posts

If you have a podcast ofr video that you want to link to from different web sites, then simply add it to taghop and if you are displaying your latest items (see the "new" link at the top of the page) then the list will be automatically updated in all of your sites.

This has been added after being requested by a number of people on taghop. Let me know if you find it useful!

A response to managing tags and categories

Joseph A. di Paolantonio recently blogged a great post about the initial work i have been doing on relating categories and tags around the Internet. As you may or may not have picked up from my blog, the last 2 weeks have been about me finishing my previous job and moving on to some start up ideas i have had. Therefore I must apologise for the delay in replying; however, I have revised some of taghop.ORG based on what some of you folks told me and i'm ready to do business again!

Let's start out with some of the questions Josepth asked - please note that i am in the stage before "Early Stage" in my thinking, so there are some basic questions still looking for answers. Let's think of taghop.ORG as a collaborative experiment for the moment!

• I found a "developer's page" - Is Taghop Open Source?
  No it's not. Mainly because there is no base code architecture yet manly because i'm stringing together some thoughts and hopefully the next few weeks will see some direction to it all. I will then have a rethink about whther that may be useful.
• What license is being used?
  Completely free. Early days, so if this changes i'll be sure to let you know. However, for users this will always be free.
  
• Scaling: the presentation of how blogs are related seems a bit cumbersome, but the "example" showing graphical relationships is cool - perhaps a "map" of relationships might be better than a list. Or I may not understand how the relationship presentation works.
  I completely agree and have simplified things somewhat. I do wish i was a Flash expert!! Or even a graphics expert. However, i'm starting with text just now to see whether there is any point in looking at more advanced techniques. I'd sure be happy to listen to anyone who could drop in a Flash prototype though! (not used it since the days of Splash!!)
  
• Is there anyway to add a tag/category to multiple URL's at once? It took me quite a bit of time to add the few URL's and tags that I've done so far.
  Not yet, but a good idea. I wasn't sure how popular something like this may become, so bulk addings wasn't an issue. However you have a very rich category system in your blog and i can imaging it would be hugely advantageous for you to be able to relate multiple categories in one go.
  
• I see that there is a toolbar for IE, when is one coming for Firefox, Mosilla, Opera, Safari, etc? I don't use IE, except to test new CSS; so I'm not sure if the toolbar answers my above question.
  Possibly. The IE toolbar isn't for taghop.ORG yet - you may notice i have a .com and .ORG site. The .ORG site is what i am looking at just now - however, the toolbar is not build for the .ORG site. Sorry for the confusion - it's one of these things "will anyone ever look at it" - well, now i know - "yes".
  
• Is the best use of Taghop to have accounts at del.icio.us, flikr, Bayosphere, your own blogs, and the like, and to use Taghop to relate among one's own various accounts, web use and online social networks? That is, I get the feeling that one shouldn't try to import all of their bookmarks or blogmarks to Taghop, but only general or personalized pages at other online services that use a tagging system.
  Spot on - yes. taghop.ORG is not for all of your links to be sent there. It's purpose is to relate generate "types" of information, such as tags and categories. In addition, if you have a page that is not explicitly a category, such as your local news site, you can relate this to. In this sense you aren't relating the content of the page so much as the type content that can be found there. That make sense. The example on the site has some links in this way.
  
• How could Taghop help me achieve my goals of creating some "starting point" categories for our upcoming syndication aggregator/feed reader/blogging service and some more general categories for Bayosphere Citizen Journalists?
  I think "starting point" is a great way to phrase it. The way the web works is pretty fluid - you will start at some resource and continue from there. The problem we have just now is that relations between the types of things you may be interested in don't really exist. So getting from category A to tag B is generally done by referencing a link within that cetegory rather than the category itself (if at all). This means that for every item you would have to reference something in that category, rather than just say "these things are like those things". So, as a starting point, you would have the base categories or tags that you manage or own - from there you can provide related options that people can explore. In fact the more people who collaborate the more useful the system becomes as popular categories will rise to the top. I have still to do some work on getting this part to work, but i'd imagine it may be fairly useful. You may also come at it from a user point of view. You may say here i am, here are my friends and allow people to navigate those links to see what related topics they may be interested in seeing. It gives a high enough view that you can actually start to take in the relationships between information rather than looking at the actually documents and such below there. Commonly, you may combine the two and say here is our blog roll and the related categories they offer - from that point it is simply a case of hopping the tags to discover related information.
  What I am considering (feedback please) would be the ability to then grab category based RSS feeds so that you could "hop" through categories and feeds of information, aggregating these and ignoring the rest. I'd like to hear thoughts on this one.
  
• What are the different purposes of taghop.COM and taghop.ORG? How should we use each to best help taghop?
  The .com site is some research at the moment. I'd stick with .ORG for just now. Please register on the .com site and play around, but my focus is on the possibilities of relating information for the moment.
  

I hope this is useful. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. It's early days and i'm just getting used to being able to think about this during the day now, so expect to here more and thanks for commenting Josepth.

steven :: Release 2.0 :: http://stevenR2.com

Managing Categories

Joseph A. di Paolantonio recently blogged how he re-organized his categories to use technorati tags and is hoping to move toward a better fine-tuned folksonomy.

While i belive this is useful, I still see a few factors that I hope taghop.ORG can address when looking to perform such an activity.

1. There are relationships between most of the tags/categories you associate with your content. Even when using a single folksonomy, it would be useful to be able to add a few key tags and inherit relationships with other items via their tags relationships rather than adding every tag to your post.
2. These are fine if everyone uses a single system, but it is fact and always will be that people will use distributed folksonomies and whilst a single source can be useful for a certain domain, it can be hugely useful to be able to relate and reuse distributed folksonomies
3. Finally, there is an inheritance of how you relate things. You may not TAG something directly, but there may be an inference that it is related to some other tag. These may not be the same semantic meaning, but rather a "if you are interested in this kind of thing, you may be interested in that kind of thing".

I have contacted Joseph to get his feedback and will post what he comes back to say.

Early days, but always useful to start talking with the people who are hopefully looking for some kind of solution to simple problems they have found like this!

Taghop - Open Project Collaboration

By the great power of JotSpot, I have now created a Wiki for taghop and taghop.ORG. You can now go to http://stevenr2.jot.com/ and submit your ideas and opinions on the site as well as participate in a collaborative Requirements Specification for each idea. This is a new concept for me. I previously kept my cards close to my chest, but as taghop depends on the community and its collaboration i'd like to give this a go and see where it leads us. Look forward to hearing from you.

June's Update

So I've now updated taghop and reached my June dealine.
I managed to get the IE toolbar completed and added an installer for it.

I wish we cou get plug-ins for other browsers - any help much appreciated!!

I am a little worried about performance.. i'd appreciate feedback on this and let me know where you are in the world as well please.

Few touches to add to taghop now. Don't won't to spend too much time adding features until you folks come back and tell me what's good and bad about it all.

So, the toolbar. Some very cool things now.

1. You can use the QuickBoomark options item to add the current URL to taghop without even visiting the page.

2. You can use the "Bookmark This" option to tag and comment about the URL you are adding.

3. If you tag a URL, it become your DIRECTURL. This means that you can type this tag into the toolbar box and hit enter and be taken directly to that URL. Remember RealNames? Something like that, but you control the tags :) If you type a tag you haven't added a URL for, it shows you a list of options.

4. The Shorten URL option in first dropdown allows you to get a very short generated URL for the current page. What's especially cool about this is that you don't even have to leave the page and visit another site to do it AND it'a automatically put into the clipboard ready for you to paste into emails, webpages, documents and so on. Super Cool heh?

5. Finally, the "Live Document" button goes green when taghop discovers other links that may be useful to you based on the page you are on. It pulls in information from not only taghop, but some of your favourites sites around the web. We are working on adding more to this feature to bring any web document to life!

My disclaimer is that this is still very much in beta. Loads of feedback, but as you likely know, testing can be testing. So bare with me.

Keep taghopping!

steven
founder, http://taghop.com

IE Toolbar

Been working on an IE toolbar for the last couple of weeks combined with some variation of the flu that knocked me off my pace for a bit.

The toolbar is intending to integrate data from various sources so for example, you can be on a web page and be told what other pages people say are related to that item. Soon to come will be the addition of ratings so you will know how useful those links are as well.

More later.

steven

New Improved Beta Site

Well, Taghop has undergone significant re-design.

Now we support tags, communities, subscriptions, search and a bunch of other cool stuff.

It is very easy to add information to taghop and we aim to continue to improve it. Use it and let us know how we're doing!

steven
http://taghop.com

api improved

We have now improved the API to allow you to add tags and feeds using a REST architecture.

Please build this into your applications and let us know so we can tell everyone!

More at http://www.tesarac.com/taghop/dev.aspx

steven

new features and people registering!

We have now added a "number of posts" count at the top right of each tag on the site.

We hope you find this useful and please let us know.

BTW - we have over 10 people registered now!! Where are they coming from? Hopefully soon we will find out...

steven

we have liftoff

So taghop has now launched to the public - as a community beta.

It's as much an experiment as it is a service... how far can we take the concept of tags and community? It's clear that we have a problem finding out what is going on around the web and we have a tendancy to use the main web sites as sources for our information, missing out on all the other stuff that is going on. As we know the buzz starts off with just a few people knowing and then gradually grows through viral networking... let's see if taghop can use this principle.

I'd love to hear feedback on taghop and what you think it can do for you. Tags aren't supposed to be anything specific - they morph over time according to the latest buzz relating to that tag and this is the difference in the keyword searches on a search engine, where you get a myriad of content results and a tag on taghop.

All the best,
steven
founder of taghop