New Common Tag Format

Dear Yahoo! Search et al,

Common Tag as described appears to be a reinvention of the rel-tag microformat, albeit with a much bulkier/uglier syntax.

http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag

On the CommonTag site it says:

“Unlike free-text tags, Common Tags are references to unique, well-defined concepts, complete with metadata and their own URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can more easily create topic hubs, cross-promote their content…”

rel-tag is also URL based and thus goes beyond simple free-text tags and provides references to unique well-defined concepts, complete with metadata and their own URLs.

rel-tag also enables site owners to more easily/explicitly create topic hubs, cross-promote their content etc. Numerous popular blogging systems (WordPress, Movable Type, etc.) already implement rel-tag accordingly, and have done so for about 4 years now.

In fact your very own press release for “Common Tag” uses rel-tag!

http://www.prweb.com/releases/CommonTag/2009/prweb2522914.htm

view the source and you will see plenty of rel-tags like:

…
<a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/semantic+tagging” rel=”tag” target=”tagwin”>semantic tagging</a>
<a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/tagging” rel=”tag” target=”tagwin”>tagging</a>
…

Why the reinvention with a more complicated harder to use format when there is already a semantic tagging format that works well and is widely deployed and supported?

Great :)

Would they share an API in order to generate Common Tags automatically ?

Tunisia SEO:
Right now you can get Freebase API to do ‘semantic autocompletion’. Or you can use Zemanta API to get automatic suggestions for chunks of text.

Andraz Tori, Zemanta

And I might have forgotten possibly the most important point. Common Tag encourages publishers to publich content that is tagged with concepts, not just words (hence semantic tagging). In other words, we would like to encourage site owners to tag with URIs of concepts, so that an agent can not only know that a page is about “jaguar” but that after dereferencing the URI, it can retrieve relevant information, e.g. that jaguars are animals as used here, that thus jaguars are related to wild cats (and thus other documents about wild cats) etc.

This uses the “rev” attribute, but this has been removed from HTML 5.

With the new tag format will no follow links still have the same algorithms or will there need to be some change in the protocol?

In response to our followers on Twitter: we are still committed to supporting CommonTag as a method for tagging webpages with concept identifiers, i.e. URIs from well-established knowledge bases such as Freebase [1] or Dbpedia. Yahoo Search continues to index CommonTag data and all other information added to web pages using RDFa.

[1] freebase.com
[3] dbpedia.org

In response to our followers on Twitter: we are still committed to supporting CommonTag as a method for tagging webpages with concept identifiers, i.e. URIs from well-established knowledge bases such as Freebase [1] or Dbpedia [2]. Yahoo Search continues to index CommonTag data and all other information added to web pages using RDFa.

[1] freebase.com
[2] dbpedia.org

open formats that accelerate the structure during this time oh search for year!!
if all this comes to be the truth, Yahoo has already found a way to increase accurated tags and labels to make the search a completely new experience