A Consuming Experience

Are Technorati using something clever behind the scenes that analyses how people manually tag their own blog posts, and generating "related tags" from that? Well Technorati have now officially launched "related tags", according to Dave Sifry's blog and the Technorati main page. Perhaps they now have enough of a critical mass of tagged posts that they can analyse them to a degree of accuracy that they're now happy with?

In fact I hadn't realised that related tags were only unofficial before, when I first noticed them and posted about them in early March, observing that they don't exactly match each other - if A's related tags are said to be B and C, B's related tags aren't necessarily A and C.

I hope Technorati will now reveal more about how they decide which tags are a particular tag's "related tags", as it's obviously not a simple association or grouping.

As I speculated in my previous post, depending on how they're doing it, this may be the start of possibly the next stage of development in folksonomies and tagging - namely, thesauri of synonyms generated automatically by looking at what people consider to be synonyms, weighted according to the number of people who make the same word associations (or maybe combined with some other kind of weighting, who knows)?

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