In a previous post I tried to describe how I thought technologies like SmartTags and AutoLink ought to behave. With greasemonkey in Firefox I've been able to build a proof-of-concept demonstrator. For the moment I'm calling it Smart Tag/Auto Link. SmartLink is based upon the idea that content authors should mark-up content that can be 'smart-linked', using standard XHTML constructs. This has two advantages: it effectively provides an 'opt-in' mechanism for content providers it doesn't require 'magic' to identify what can be smart-linked and thus provides a much more extensible approach. of course there is one fairly major disadvantage: there isn't any suitably marked-up content out there, with the exception of some test posts I've put together for the purpose. Getting Started If you want to know a bit more about SmartLink then click here . Alternatively if you want to see how SmartLink behaves and you're using Firefox t...
microformats may well represent a path from where we are today to the [lowercase] semantic web. If so, one of the first waypoints along such a path could be the emergence of aggregators capable of taking advantage of suitably marked-up content. Applying a 'microformat' approach to tagging, Technorati introduced the rel="tag" approach to marking-up tags. Technorati also supply the corresponding aggregation service, e.g. see posts tagged with microformat . Given this minimalist approach to tagging, the hReview specification comes as something of a surprise. It seems to represent a format developed independently of the environment in which it is most likely to be used. The rel="tag" approach makes a major, simplifying assumption. This is that the tag refers 'to a major portion of the current page (i.e. a blog post)' . I am assuming that it could apply equally to a blog entry in an RSS/Atom feed. Thus an aggregator can associate a tag with two p...
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? 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> 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 the...
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