June 11, 2009
New Common Tag Format
Today we are announcing our support of Common Tag, a new semantic tagging format for Web pages. Developed jointly by a group of Web companies including Zemanta, Metaweb, and Yahoo!, the Common Tag format adds semantic meaning to tags, making Web content more discoverable and enabling the community to create more useful applications for aggregating, searching, and browsing the Web.
At Yahoo! Search, we’re proponents of open formats that accelerate the structuring of the Web and that improve the community’s overall ability to understand the Web. You can read more about this new format, which just launched today, on the Common Tag Website.
Yahoo! Search
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
Thanks for your help and why my site’s all page cannot be indexed.
Hi Tantek,
There are a couple of key differences. First, with Common Tag you can tag any object, not just a document. Second, Common Tag is based on RDF, which brings the benefits of extensibility that microformats in general are lacking. As an example, Common Tag provides a way to capture the date of tagging, who did the tagging, whether it was the author or the reader of the article, or a machine etc.
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.
Thanks for your help and why my site’s all page cannot be indexed.
good post.
@shalila
You submit sitemap, hopefully you site links would be indexed one by one after a few days.
sitemap helps you think? It takes so long to be indexed in yahoo! even with a sitemap.
Sitemaps seem to be a very useful tool on some sites but does anybody actually use them?
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?
Lately I hear many good news from you.
I use movable type and your search is very good for it