Technorati, Tags, Semantics

Hey, the Technorati beta is up. Looks much nicer, though I wish they’d lose the dude with the megaphone; goatees are so 1993. (Hey look, Technorati and Newsweek, sitting in a tree.) Among other things, the technorationals are making a concerted effort to prove that my doubts about tagging are misplaced—so are Shirky et al at You’re It!. It’s become obvious that tags are useful enough as a place to park search words for pictures & music & other stuff that doesn’t have words to search. Furthermore, I’ve heard a dozen compelling stories from people who are using tags to organize their own information and track trends; so it’s looking like the answers are: Yes, tagging is useful; No, it’s not a replacement for full-text search, even partially. On the subject of search, Sun’s Search Guy Steve Green is trying to push over the boundary between search and semantics.