January 8th is the birthday of tags, according to the Technorati web log. I have one major problem with this:
It might be the second anniversary of tags on Technorati but sites like del.icio.us had them first. Mr. Sifry even says that in the post, which puzzles me because it contradicts the message in the rest of the post: that Technorati invented tagging. The “Technorati Buzz” email said the same thing, only minus any mention of prior art.
It’s nice to see that stealing credit is alive and well in 2007.
Cluelessness thrives, too:
The beauty of tags is that they’re metadata: data about data. What does that mean? Tags actually describe their subject, as opposed to, say, keywords, which just occur within them.
Dude, have you ever heard of keywords before? Maybe you missed the part where web designers have been putting keywords in their documents as metadata for oh, a decade? Keywords describe their subject just like tags do. Or they don’t, just like tags don’t have to. The significant difference is that tags can be defined by the users of the data, not just the authors or owners. Tags are keywords but not all keywords are tags.
Oh, and while I’m at it, apparently January 17th is the actual anniversary of tags, according to Sifry’s original post.
All I can say is “WTF.”