Harnessing Rich Metadata
June 20th, 2007 GeekeryOne of the challenges with Thoof is encouraging good tagging. A good set of tags on the story helps readers navigate the content better, and also feeds into our story selection algorithm to ensure interesting stories are found for each user.
One way we can do this is through our tag suggestion mechanism. This is the auto-completion drop-down you see when you add or edit tags on a story. This not only lets us suggest what you might be introducing as a tag, but to correct common ambiguities and mispellings. To try this out, try typing part of “Hillary Clinton”. You’ll be suggested the senator’s full name, guessed using the metadata we’ve collected from tagging and elsewhere.
We can use this information in other ways as well, for example to infer which topics a tag might also imply, such as that Hillary Clinton may imply Politics, and so forth.
5 Responses to “Harnessing Rich Metadata
salvage
i have one major suggestion.
show the news as a list, not four boxes per page. yes if i scroll down there will be another four boxes of even six depending on my screen resolution, but its not cool.
im used to having a list like on digg, reddit and technorati.
thnx
toffer Surovec
Hey, could it be possible to maybe make it easier to log in? Going back to the invite email every time to get in is a bit of a pain and I’m not going to bookmark a page with the option to change my password right at the top of the page.
ian
toffer, we should be going public next week at which time this problem will go away. We realize its annoying, but it would be rather difficult to change, and we would prefer to focus our energies on problems that won’t go away next week.
We hope you can bear with us until then.
Mindy McAdams
I just attempted to add two new tags to the shish kebab vendor story on the Thoof home page today. Everything seemed to work okay, and I saw my two new tags — but when I went to the home page, the tags are not there.
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