Where’s So Interesting
| Monday, November 27th, 2006 | --jr |
I've been reading a few of the other Y!Blogs (over on the right), and one that caught my interest was a post on the Y!Berkeley Research Blog. It's interesting to consider the names of places and things that people determine, often they can be different than what you expect. I think that's the most curious thing about the whole tagging phenomenon. It's the additive bits of information that you can provide that eventually form the whole of what folks are thinking. I also appreciate what the folks over at the sports blog have suggested and frankly, it reminds me that I have to go pester folks in Y!Local to make those individually applied tags searchable. Yes, there's the very real chance for abuse, but it's just the right thing to do, and frankly, there's an easy solution to that problem as well.
Still, if you want to do a search for public tags, there's a bit of URL Hackery you can do (as I mention in the Y! Sports Blog) comments.
To do it, you have to take advantage of a bug feature in the Y!Local search setup. If you enter something like:
http://local.yahoo.com/results?tags=1&stx=sports+bar&csz=sunnyvale+ca
You'll get all the items marked with "sports bar" in Sunnyvale CA. (The "csz" stands for "CityStateZip".) If you set csz to something unresolvable like http://local.yahoo.com/results?tags=1&stx=sports+bar&csz=xyz You'll get ALL the publicly tagged "sports bar" items.
As for "public" vs. "your" tags, the tags currently have to go through moderation to prevent lawyers from showing up. Any tag you provide has the chance at becoming a public tag, so feel free to tag whatever you like in Local however you want to.
Meanwhile, I'll try to work on the other folks in Local to lighten up and make the tag search bug feature a bit less hidden.