Lazycoder

Tagging and discovery

inessential.com: Weblog: Comments for ‘Tag subscriptions in NetNewsWire’: “Here’s the deal: services such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati have pages and feeds for things that have been ‘tagged’with various keywords.”

(Via inessential.com.)

Brent Simmons talks about the “Subscribe to tag” feature in NetNewsWire 2.0. This is a great feature. I tried this out this afternoon. But then I realized something. I was having trouble thinking of any Technorati, Flickr, or Delicious tags. How do you discover new tags? I tried the random method. Well it’s not really random. You just type in a few things you think would be tags and see if anything comes back. For example, I typed in “Game Development” and said they were Delicious tags. (The box doesn’t say you can combine tags when you create the subscription but I had a hunch it would be allowed). Voila, I came back with a feed based on those tags. I tried a couple of others with similar success. A “Seattle Jazz Music” Yahoo search resulted in news about some upcoming concerts.

It’s a very underreported feature. One, I think, should be included in all RSS aggregators in the future.