Via funkaoshi comes a link to a Technorati Cosmos plugin for Textpattern. Combined with tag functionality, (also see much discussion at the forum and Burning Bird’s tagback effort) this plugin makes for some pretty tight integration with Technorati. (The author, whose blog is lovely and largely in Italian—which itself is lovely—has also written a WYSIWYG editing plugin for Txp. Mad skills. Abilite arrabbiarsi? Probably not quite right.)
Also on the subject of tags, Jonas Luster has lately been doing some neat tinkering: He’s using Yahoo[!]’s term extraction API to automatically extract tags from posts in Wordpress and display them as links to Technorati tags.
I’ve been tinkering with a few elements of This Old Site this afternoon, adding the ability to send information to Technorati Tags. Tags will be familiar to users of del.icio.us or flickr. This kind of tagging system has lately been dubbed folksonomy. When you view individual entries here, you’ll now get a bit of extra information displayed below the link (for items in the linklog) or formal category (for regular articles): One or more tags will show up, and, when clicked, they will lead on to the Technorati page associated with that tag.
That page displays some cool information: It starts with tags sent directly to Technorati, and adds to it links with the same tags gathered from del.icio.us and flickr. See for example the page for the sociology tag. So from a single entry here, it’s possible to navigate within this site using my set of categories, or to navigate through external links that have some association with that topic. Pretty neat. When a textpattern tool to navigate by tags within a site is put together, the formally-structured categories may drop out entirely—in the meantime, there is some redundancy between categories and tags.
For Textpattern, see ajw_technorati_tags for a plugin to enable tags.
