Bookmarking and tagging websites can be a messy business. Zigtag, a new sidebar-based plugin currently in private beta, is looking to offer clean and streamlined bookmarking and tagging. The plugin differentiates itself from the multitude of other tagging services by introducing a semantic dictionary of over two million tags. The basic idea: each tag will be defined, and that synonymous tags (say, New York City and Big Apple) will be linked together automatically. That should make finding your bookmarks easier later on.
After entering an appropriate tag for a page, the user is presented with a list of matching keywords, each of which has been defined in Zigtag’s database. For example, after entering “Apple” into the search field, I was able to choose from “the computer company”, “the pomaceous fruit”, and “the record company”, among others. The process is painless and the integrated dictionary is fairly comprehensive. If you happen to stumble across a term that isn’t defined, you can easily request to have it added to the dictionary (and can place your own temporary tag).
Besides the tagging functionality, Zigtag also offers a Digg-like thumbs up/down system, which influences a list of popular bookmarked sites on the Zigtag homepage. The site also has some basic social networking features, allowing for group-specific privacy settings and sharing with friends. There are a number of other handy features, including “Share Page” that lets you send snippets of images and text on a page to friends through email.
My experience with Zigtag was promising, but the plugin still needs some work. Using the sidebar can be pretty unintuitive, especially when you’re searching for something using multiple tags. And many of the synonyms I tried weren’t in the database yet (No mention of Bruce Springsteen for “The Boss”).
Zigtag’s biggest obstacle is the slew of other social bookmarking sites already available (Delicious, Diigo, and Twine, to name a few). The semantic tagging feature is fairly unique, but its appeal is still untested, especially against automated semantic taggers like Twine. Frankly, a lot of people are just going to stick with the simple but effective Delicious interface.
For those looking to try out Zigtag (Firefox only for now), you can grab one of 500 invites here.
If Zigtag could import bookmarks from Del.icio.us and others, that would make it a lot more useful. I’m impressed by the thought of having definitions for tags, yet a little nervous that it’s privately owned, so in reality, they control the ultimate definitions of things. At least the Digg like voting has the promise of keeping the system in check.
Can the Semantic portion be “trained”? {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/hB9tzinPIf_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Can the Semantic portion be “trained”? ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/EVnlEZHi3x”}}}
Michael,
Zigtag can import delicious bookmarks, and a full delicious sync is on the way in the next couple weeks.
A fully public API, allowing the same level of access that delicious’s API allows, is also in the works.
The semantic web is finally gaining traction…
Isn’t the nice thing about tags that they are not semantic ?
Maybe chaos should rule in tagging, if in doubt add a few extra tags but try not to create a semantic dictionary. However i could be wrong, interesting to see how this develops. When the IE sidebare comes i will surely try it.
Couldn’t they just use Wikipedia as their tag library and save the data entry?
I just installed it, it takes a lot of space in the browser and the install is long for a Firefox plugin.
But I’m fan of the idea!
The tagging in social bookmarking sites are most important, the feature of matching keywords looks impressive.
There are so many emerging semantic web companies now, but few if any make money. The only one that I’ve heard of that has the best semantic technology (quality, speed) is Relevad (www.relevad.com). It is growing really fast, been profitable for more than 2 years and has many high profile customers (ad networks, publishers, domain parkers, advertisers). Plus it has the best automatic semantic tagging and categorization system on the market.
I am not great at tagging my own posts. And I am looking forward to there being a tagging tool to help out my readers. Just posted about what I hope to get out of zigtag (and/or other semantic stuff) here: http://webpoet....ging-assistant/
I gave it a try and generally liked it though I look forward to the simplicity and portability of the bookmarklet interface when and if it becomes available. I have to admit I was a little disappointed to see it at first as we have been working on a very similar tool for a while now (http://www.entitydescriber.org). The main differences are that ours is built for the academic world (through integration with Connotea) and uses Freebase as the tag dictionary. The value of capturing the semantics right at the time when the user is engaged with the item they are tagging is huge… I’m very curious to see how the semantic tags added by the users compare with those added automatically. My guess is that they will be different and both be useful.
What a fantastic idea – tagging suffers so bad from the lack of semantics, and lack of feedback (what should I be tagging so that I know how i can find my own stuff) and i am very much looking forward to using this when the bookmarklet is ready!
Ming, a bookmarklet is available now – http://www.zigtag.com/install/. A plugin for IE is also coming soon.
Sally and Ming and everyone else of course,
you are so right about the trouble of finding the correct words/tags to help readers discover your content. I think the problem with tagging is that one needs to make sure the main topics of an entry are very precise, so that it’s easily discoverable. Though first one needs to define “precise”.
Trying to figure it out in my project, so join in if you like
http://topify.w...ional-marriage/
Just a heads up on Fuzzzy.com, a similar service (albeit not a sidebar-based plugin) that has been online for quite some time, and that also offers a web service interface for developers to use.
Figured it might be relevant to this article and its readers…
In the words of one of my co-workers, “can you say ‘controlled vocabulary’”? Welcome to the world of librarians. We’ve been doing this for over 100 years.
Tom: You’re of course, right but I don’t recall seeing any libraries doing this with technology or on-line, though. Sadly, many still live in the stone age.
A short question to Jason:
I posted a blog entry a couple of days ago linkingto this one, but the trackback either didn’t work or you rejected it. I’m pretty new to blogging so I might have done something wrong, but please tell me how to adjust that so that the trackback would appear here (and for all future posts I reference).
My post is the last one at http://topify.wordpress.com
Thank you!