The Cynosural Blog

I recently posted about Categories for news feeds and blogging, in relation to suggesting additional categories for Bayosphere Citizen Journalists' articles and for organizing the RSS, RDF or Atom feeds to which one might subscribe in a feed reader. You can read the original post in either the TeleInterActive Lifestyle or Bayosphere. Steven Livingstone-Perez responded, via trackback, in taghop: Managing Categories

Joseph A. di Paolantonio recently blogged how he re-organized his categories to use technorati tags and is hoping to move toward a better fine-tuned folksonomy.

While i belive this is useful, I still see a few factors that I hope taghop.ORG can address when looking to perform such an activity.

-- StevenR2 in taghop: Managing Categories

So, I've spent some time since I saw Steven's response reading about Taghop, both in the COM and ORG domains. I created a Taghop account and added some URLs, for blogs from the TeleInterActive Press and Bayosphere, and used some of the "public" URLs for various news organizations. Taghop allows one to relate the tags/categories to others' tags or categories, and allows one to do so regardless of where one uses those tags, such as de.licio.us. So, Taghop was the impetus that I needed to create a del.icio.us account.

I'm still getting the feel for things at Taghop, and Taghop is in beta. Perhaps Steven can answer some questions for me, and please don't read anything below as a criticism.

• I found a "developer's page" - Is Taghop Open Source?
• What license is being used?
• Scaling: the presentation of how blogs are related seems a bit cumbersome, but the "example" showing graphical relationships is cool - perhaps a "map" of relationships might be better than a list. Or I may not understand how the relationship presentation works
• Is there anyway to add a tag/category to multiple URL's at once? It took me quite a bit of time to add the few URL's and tags that I've done so far.
• I see that there is a toolbar for IE, when is one coming for Firefox, Mosilla, Opera, Safari, etc? I don't use IE, except to test new CSS; so I'm not sure if the toolbar answers my above question.
• Is the best use of Taghop to have accounts at del.icio.us, flikr, Bayosphere, your own blogs, and the like, and to use Taghop to relate among one's own various accounts, web use and online social networks? That is, I get the feeling that one shouldn't try to import all of their bookmarks or blogmarks to Taghop, but only general or personalized pages at other online services that use a tagging system.
• How could Taghop help me achieve my goals of creating some "starting point" categories for our upcoming syndication aggregator/feed reader/blogging service and some more general categories for Bayosphere Citizen Journalists?
• What are the different purposes of taghop.COM and taghop.ORG? How should we use each to best help taghop?

Steven, Taghop looks like an interesting project/product/service. Perhaps you could help us understand Taghop better, and answer my questions, via a post on your blog, with a tracback here. I look forward to conversing with you.