Some people, including me, feel awkward about using Technorati as the namespace for our tags. (The namespace is the place that your tags link to.) I use Technorati not because — disclosure — I am on their board of advisors but because I mistakenly thought I had to if I wanted my tags indexed by Technorati. Nope. Even if you link to some other site, Technorati will index your tags.

So, what other namespaces are there? I asked Dave Sifry and he suggested Wikipedia as an obvious choice. That would mean that the tags at the end of your article would link to the Wikipedia article by that name. I’ve done that with the tags for this post, so if you click on the tag “tagging,” it takes you to the Wikipedia entry on tagging. Normally, my tags take you to the Technorati page that aggregates other pages tagged with that tag.

E.g., Instead of <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/tagging” rel=”tag”> tagging</a> I’m using, <a href=”http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/tagging” rel=”tag”> tagging</a>

Of course, where there is no Wikipedia entry, e.g., “everything is miscellaneous,” you get a broken link.

So, shouldn’t there be a non-vendor, open site that can serve as a namespace? But what would that site do with the tags it’s aggregating? And what would it take for it to aggregate those tags? Wouldn’t it have to have Technorati’s infrastructure? In other words, wouldn’t you have to rebuild Technorati?

I happen to be a fan of Technorati (and not because of my relationship to the company). I know and trust Dave Sifry. But there’s always a risk to counting on a particular company to be a continuing part of your own infrastructure. If Technorati goes under, or gets bought and becomes evil, I have several years of posts pointing at it. Plus, I actually like the tag services Technorati provides. So, I’m not sure what to do… [Tags: tags technorati taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

Categories: Uncategorized dw