P@ Sunglasses
e enjte shkurt 10, 2005
Tagsurf: a clever use of the tagging concept Through Russel Beattie, Tagsurf: Tagged Hyperforum I tried Tagsurf, a new app leveraging tagging, bookmarklets and RSS in an interesting way. It's the product of a confrontational chat session between Russel Beattie and Anthony Eden. I'm not surprised the combination worked so well: I've always considered Russ as a fantastic product manager, who needs a perfect geek like Anthony to make his ideas real, like the Andreesen-Bina combo who made Mosaic.
Tagsurf allows you to comment on links using a simple bookmarklet. The link you comment about is considered a tag, and you can add tags to your post. Then the aggregated posts for a tag (which can be a link) are displayed either in html or as a RSS feed. Very smart. Here's an example for Russel's post which led me there.
I recorded my first impressions about the site by using it to comment on Russel's post, so I won't repeat it here, just follow the link.
I discovered that 20 minutes ago and I still don't understand all the implications and potential issues with this system, but I feel that familiar vertigo that takes you when confronted with a very elegant, generic and powerful architecture. A few times when I felt that in the past were when I discovered legos, lisp, http and jini. The comparison may seem overblown, but since one year everyone plays with tagging, applying it to various applications, and I think Russ and Anthony hit a sweet spot here!
What I'm going to do when I post this entry is to tag my comment with the url of this entry, and tag Russ's post with it as well. These operations could be performed automatically by your weblog server when you post an item: determine item link, extract all links in post, tag all links in tagsurf with the item link. Trackback does that already, using a different protocol, so you just have to add the tagsurf api part before your trackback handler.
The W3C Annotea project never got a wide adoption, even if there is a Mozilla plugin took off since 2001: I have a hunch that this small app has a chance of helping annotating become a mainstream habit. To the W3C's credit, Tagsurf benefits from the rising blog and syndication tide.
More comments when I have played with the app a bit more.
( Shk 10 2005, 06:02:50 PD PST ) Permalink Comments [1] Chat about it
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Posted by LudoBlog on shkurt 10, 2005 at 04:24 MD PST #