2006-01-10

Socially made tag site navigation: any providers?

I have recently been in touch with Hans Persson of Project Runeberg, a volunteer effort to create free electronic editions of classic Nordic (Scandinavian) literature and make them openly available over the Internet. It's a well established project that has been running since 1992 and already spans in excess of a thousand volumes of works by 286 authors, a total of 387409 pages (and counting) scanned from works predating the reach of today's copyright rules. (Works by creditors who died more than 70 years ago are all in the public domain.)

Needless to say, covering that many books, their web site is gigantic, and making a good and relevant navigation system is quite the undertaking, especially to a volunteer project on a limited work force and budget. So they are considering social bookmarking services as a means for making site navigation too backed by visitor interest, knitting together what has been bookmarked and tagged by their visitors, with other pages at runeberg.org (their site), tagged with similar tags.

Before they embark on creating a bucketload of server side scripts and cron jobs to occassionally scrape social bookmarking services such as Del.icio.us or Technorati, I think it would be prudent to toss out the question of whether this is a service in the works or already provided by any of the tagging services, large or small. They already sit on the databases and are in a great position to set up a service to address this use case, which I believe has a huge potential of being a useful service to web sites of all topics and domains, all over the world, and probably one that could easily finance itself all of its own.

A quick off the top of my head sketch of a suitable mode of operation:

  • Given a URL, look up all tags from all taggers for that page.

  • Cross-reference those tags with other pages from the same domain, having tags in common with this page, sorted in descending order by how many.

  • Provide this dataset in JSONP form for the referring page to layout as it wishes.

  • For points of style, embed a permalink URL in said JSONP package to an RSS feed of this dataset, covering links for the given search criteria in the future, as and when they are added.

Readers are most encouraged to expand on the ideas and link projects, present and future, that cover similar ground.
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1 comment:

  1. SingpolymaSat Jan 14, 08:30:00 AM PST

    Wanabo does the by-users offsite tag navigation thing, but they do it with their own data, not by scraping del.icio.us et al...

    ReplyDelete

Limited HTML (such as <b>, <i>, <a>) is supported. (All comments are moderated by me amd rel=nofollow gets added to links -- to deter and weed out monetized spam.)

I would prefer not to have to do this as much as you do. Comments straying too far off the post topic often lost due to attention dilution.

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