[Web4lib] rssify del.icio.us, citeseer google scholar...

[Jorge Serrano Cobos]

Tyson Tate told me privately about Magnolia, http://ma.gnolia.com/ and ask
me about why not to use tags for information retrieval purposes. We agreed
to share this with you all, I think could be interesting to think about
differences between tagging (active content description) and retrieval (¿or
not?)

 My personal opinion:

About why to use queries instead of tags for rssfying feeds, well, I´ve been
working with taggers (profesional and non-profesionals) and I´ve seen them
describing contents in a different "language" than they search; they usually
search in a different way, not like they describe, even when searching (not
browsing) the same information they have been tagging some time before,
which is -for me- one of the problems of tags.

If we take a look at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal we
can see what (and how much) people is actually looking for any concept, and
you should see a range of more detailed keywords, compared to the closest
tag (semantically)

Yes, it´s common to see more searches for general keywords, but we can see
also a long tail distribution, where (many times) the sum of all the
searches for specific queries is more than the number of searches for the
big general concepts. And when one is looking for being updated about a
specific area, I see people being very specific, or at least painfully
learning how much info drives to your system the rss general tag.

With so much information tagged with the same tag, noise arises, and I do
really need to narrow the rss information which I´m able to read everyday. I
think many more people have the same problem as me, I´m information
overloaded, even using rss for specific tags.

By the way, I´ve seen another way to do it in http://blogsearch.google.es/ An
example:

http://blogsearch.google.es/blogsearch?hl=es&ie=UTF-8&q=%22information+seeking%22&btnG=Buscar+blogs&lr
=

Anyway, different ways to get what you need and don´t get lost in the info
ocean;-)

Of course, thank you very much for your attention, and sorry for my english
(I´m spaniard) Regards,

-- 
Jorge Serrano Cobos
Content Department
http//www.masmedios.com

http://www.thinkepi.net
Personal web: http://trucosdegoogle.blogspot.com