As you can see from the initial Tagback, created for yesterday’s post, several people have added weblog posts that tagback to the original item. In addition, a new del.icio.us tag, tagback, was created, and since neither the original del.icio.us bbintroducingtagback and tagback tag entries are being pulled into the Technorati tagback page (anyone know why?), I used furl to add links to both delicious tag pages, as reference. And others have added the Technorati tagback page to the del.icio.us tagback page, as cross-reference.
Now when you access the page, you’ll find weblog posts that respond to the original post, my funky photos, as well as cross-references to related but not directly linked material, including material from a rival bookmarking site.
There has been considerable, and good, discussion about using a tag, or even the name I used yesterday and I’m going to cover these in more detail in my long awaited – you are waiting for it, still, I hope–sequel to tags and folksonomies, which should be out late tonight. However, before I expanded on the concept of tagbacks, I did want to see Technorati’s reaction, first. After all, I am proposing to utilize more, perhaps considerably more, of the organization’s resources. However, from Dave Sifry’s early response, the company is cool with the concept.
Speaking of such heavy utilization of Technorarti, Kaf asked the question in my comments about whether I am changing my mind about centralized services. After all, Technorati is centralized, and trackback is distributed. My answer is that once a resource has been corrupted by outside interests, as trackback and comments have been, then I would rather centralize that resource in the care of skilled technicians who are motivated to keep the resource clean, then put the burden on all the poor souls who don’t know SQL and don’t understand XML-RPC and pagerank, or who don’t have the tools to easily clean up their sites.
There is a risk that Technorati may go away someday, or put up a costwall between us and the data, especially if investment companies urge this. However, by making use of many resources, such as del.icio.us, furl, even flickr, (and other tag based entities sure to pop up), and cross referencing the material, we should be able to pick up the threads if need be. And I am making an assumption about Technorati: that the organization doesn’t intend to cause harm. They might put ads into the tagback pages, but we’ve seen ads embedded in all of the facilities we use, and they don’t cause harm. Still, to repeat: we are backing up the threads by using cross-references in other tag-enabled tools, no offense Dave and Kevin and other folk at Technorari.
In addition, if I understand the documentation with Technorati tags correctly, the URIs we use don’t have to be to Technorati, though I’m not sure how this works yet, especially in regards to tagback–still experimenting around.
Another personal refinement is that I decided not to generate new tagbacks automatically with each post, because some posts, such as this, are an addition to one published previously. I’ll use the original tagback for all posts on the same thread. In addition, not every one of my posts needs a tagback page, though if I don’t add one, with tag systems such as delicious and furl, flickr, and other systems sure to spring up, as well as webloggers ready to wield that mighty link to create a tagback page, someone can always create one for me if they disagree.
The tag for this post is bbintroducingtagback. To add an item to the discussion surrounding this post, you can use this tag with a flickr photo or as a del.icio.us or furl bookmark tag. You can also include the following Technorati tag in your post: http://technorati.com/tag/bbintroducingtagback.