On Monday Dave Sifry of Technorati posted
Happy Taggiversary,
an entry marking the second anniversary of Technorati tags. In it he
announced the launch of tag pages, a
kind of 10×10 of semantic tags
assigned to various blog entries around the web for this hour. Instead of
10×10’s keyword/picture relay, we get a cloud of the tags themselves.
I’m interested in the response to Sifry offered by Matthew Hurst at
Data Mining. Hurst contends that tags, whether assigned by authors or by
third-parties, constitute object data rather than metadata. Because search
engines easily conflate the semantic content of tags for the semantic content of
a blog entry itself, tags are more appropriately identified as object data.
Hurst differentiates textual objects from non-textual objects; for the latter,
semantic tags are less likely to be confused with the object itself, as with an
image, for example.