Categorization and Tagging Finally Reaches the Blogosphere

As we've known in the news business for decades tagging news content makes it more valuable. Adding things like category codes, PeopleTickering, company stock tickers and other forms of tagging is extremely valuable for helping people find what they need.

As we've known in the news business for decades tagging news content makes it more valuable. Adding things like category codes, PeopleTickering, company stock tickers and other forms of tagging is extremely valuable for helping people find what they need. Plain old word search just isn’t enough.

Technorati, a blog search engine, does a good job at allowing blog creators to implement their own tags that serve as categories. As Jon Fine writes in MEDIA CENTRIC column in BusinessWeek, “Technorati's search database will harness the collective smarts of a critical mass of engaged users.”

Tagging stories helps people who frequently search blogs for interesting content on a particular subject to find it easily. For example, blogs are increasingly used by journalists to research stories, and bloggers use tags to make the posts easy to locate.

Although Technorati Tags is much better than no tags at all, the fact that the tags are added by bloggers themselves creates the possibility of “tag spam” as bloggers try to get picked up on multiple tags that may be unrelated to what the post is about.

A solution that Newstex embraces to solve the “tag spam” problem is to bring the best blogs on particular subjects into a news processing engine and then assign tags based on an algorithm that determines what the blog is about.

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