You’re right about technoratti tags.. are they relevant enough for spammers yet?!

But you’re wrong about delicious. I’ve been using it PROLIFICALLY and the ability to recall information from it is amazing. I’ve never lost something I’ve tagged with Del.icio.us. That’s said I’m still experimenting. How many tags is to many 1000, 2000, 10000. I’m well on my way. Also, will it still work in two years, ten years? How does it scale? 20,000 bookmarks.. 100,000?

Therein you can see the difference though. I’m tagging for MYSELF. Not to promote and market. What in the hell was technoratti thinking.

What makes technoratti fail and delicious work is TRUST CIRCLES. Circles of trust, boundaries. It’s basic group psychology. Groups must have boundaries. Sure technoratti has a boundary, it’s the blogosphere. But ironically blogger, another google service is now getting spammed to hell (blogs created just for spamming) because the boundaries are so low. Blogger is not the problem though. Blogs should be available to all PEOPLE, emphasis on the people. Yeah, ok, so some of the problem is bloggers for not filtering out bots. But technoratti and google search are the real problems, also other search engines. They need to keep innovating to stay ahead of the spam, but the thing is they can’t with tags. Or.. it’ll at least be very hard. My suggestion would be putting more emphasis on verification that blogs are legit. Strengthening the boundary. But still this is only part of the problem.

Del.icio.us has 3 trust circles.

1) me - I tag for myself first

2) my friends and channels

3) everyone on del.icio.us, minus people I can block

It’s only because delicious aligns itself with our selfish interests, has multiple well defined boundaries to define trust and finally has a flag again spammers that it works so well for tagging.

On the other hand technoratti sucks because it’s implementation of tagging is as a communal activity with poorly defined boundaries, no safeguards, and worst of all tagging doesn’t help ME, the tagger find things, it helps me push my things on others.

Can technoratti tagging still work? Well, I’m surprised it’s lasted this long. But I think they might be able to get more milage out of it if they

1) as mentioned, get a hold on verifying which blogs are spam and which aren’t. This should be infinitely easier that say, email. Because blogs are based on a subscription mechanism and all you have to do is verify the source, aka, the domain, or the individual feed. They could even put in a mechanism for reporting spam, and I’m betting the community will rally around them. That’s sort of point 3 though, provide a mechanism for reporting spam

2) technoratti needs to put more emphasis on how individuals can use tags on THEIR blog. For example. I should be able to view all blog posts tagged with said tag on my blog. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m tagging to promoting my posts which encourages lying, but while their implementing it they can think of more ways to realign tagging with more “selfish” interests. Perhaps the only thing that’s kept people honest is that technoratti tags have to be visible. Oh, and I like that they work of blog categories for several popular blog packages like wordpress and typepad… more of that is what we need… thats proper alignment of interests because the tags are based of my own interests. Ironic though isn’t it… that blogger STILL does not have categories and it and technoratti are both owned by google? Once again google’s left hand is part of the problem with it’s right hand.

3) Technoratti needs a system for reporting or flagging blog spam… See point 1.