2006 will be a tagtastic year
Greg Prosl pinged me about a video sports service he has just launched: BroadbandSports.com.
The interesting part for me at least is the tagging side. I can tag the videos with any tag I like (Del.icio.us-syle) and browse and search videos by tags. I can also subscribe to a tag. Here's the 'crashes' tag page. This is how I found this mountain bike crash video. I'm now subscribed to the 'crashes' tag feed, so as soon and the painful videos are available I'll be able to enjoy.
Nice one Greg!
This kind of tagging (referred to sometimes as social tagging) may be little niche feature today - very few sites today have tagging capability, certainly not the mainstreamers. But this is changing. Amazon for example is going full steam ahead with this approach - Amazon Tags was launched last week. Richard MacManus explains:
"You will be able to apply tags to any item on the Amazon website and your tags will be collected under your profile. I like Alan's term for that - a taglist, like a wishlist. I can envisage Amazon adding RSS feeds later, so you can subscribe to tags and your friends' tags. For now Amazon has the whole "customers who used this tag also used..." thing going on, as a tie-in with their existing personalization features."
This is powerful stuff. As more and more sites and services add tagging we'll start seeing some very interesting (if not amazing) services that ride on top of these. 2006 will be a tagtastic year.
Comments
- Anonymous
November 19, 2005
I could not agree with you more - but I think we can do much, much more with tags and make them much more organized and structured. See my comment (in agreement with yours) on Nick Bradbury OPML post, or a copy of it on my blog.
Tagtastic - I like it! - Anonymous
November 19, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
November 22, 2005
Thanks for the plug Alex.
To address your other commenters
BroadbandSports.com has made our tagging system more stuctured by mixing taxonomy and folksonomy. We employ a very basic classification system, based on just a few well-defined subcategories within each main "sport" category. We believe this hybrid was the best approach, especially as we are dealing with a clear and generally narrower community, in which we have had lots of experience, both professionally and personally.
2)Tagging video is today deemed one of the very best meethods for identifying "meaning" of the video's contents. While simple, it works, works good and alot better than other methods. - Anonymous
November 22, 2005
<i> Tagging fails because of the human factor of fallibility. Not too different that the error factor in eye witness testimony.</i>
..for an individual, yes, but when you harness the power of the community of content consumers, interesting aggregate patterns in taxonomy emerge that are useful. - Anonymous
March 25, 2006
Right, enough cataloging of everyone else's 2006 predictions...with about 4 hours to go before the start... - Anonymous
June 09, 2006
About four weeks ago I made my way over to ZDNet's studios in San Francisco to be interviewed by Mike...