AutoTag: AutoLink/SmartTags done right

In all the debate about Google's AutoLink feature I've seen virtually nothing about how the AutoLink/SmartTag (AutoTag anyone?) concept could be made to work better with the notable exception of Don Park who was right on the money weeks ago Fixing AutoLink. Obviously there are points of principle that need to be debated; the right of an author not to have their content altered and allowing users to escape from a mass of inward-looking links.

But rather than complaining and hoping the problem will go away, how about trying to address these issues by building a better AutoTag?

1. Require authors to opt-in by requiring them to make their content explicitly auto-taggable. For example have them mark-up such content [see previous post]

   <span class="autotag" type="address">
   This is an address
   </span>

2. The first time auto-taggable content of a particular 'type' is found, ask the user if (a) they want such content auto-tagged and if so then (b) which of a selection of services do they wish to link to.

An additional benefit of (1) is that it can be easily extended to handle different types of content - no need to code the magic required to identify content and its 'type'. Consequently it would be possible to identify both books and films by name.

With respect to (2) it should be noted that Google already provide access to a variety of mapping services, but they default the service to their own.

From my perspective as a user, there is a lot to be gained from AutoTag functionality done right. And it doesn't stop at linking up to remote web services. The same approach can be used to link from web pages to desktop applications. For example it is frustrating to have to cut information from a web-site and then paste it piece-meal back into a form to update contact/event information, especially when there are perfectly good machine readable formats to do the job.

Clearly it is unreasonable to expect a lone web-site author to do the work required to convert the human-readable information they have at hand into the arcane machine-speak required to talk to Outlook, let alone a range of desktop and service based apps. But perhaps the same author could be persuaded to wrap a few angle-brackets around what they know to be the crucial information. The problem could be solved with the help of a few remote 'helper' services that could accept text fragments, parse them and return suitably formatted and mime-typed responses.

I don't know how difficult it is to write an IE toolbar or a Firefox extension, but I'm hoping/guessing that most of the heavy-lifting is being done by the services that are being linked to. Thankfully there are mapping services that can deal with addresses and don't have to be talked to politely using coordinates.

What we need is a neutral switch embedded in the browser that can route auto-taggable content from the web-pages we view to the services of our choice.

Technorati tag: autolink