I'm confused--you said that you were adding unique tagback tags to your postings, and then at the bottom your posting says that its tagback tag is bbintroducingtagback, which was Shelley's tagback tag 0 (i.e. the one for her post that announced her idea). Shouldn't you have made up a new one for this posting, e.g. nwfolksonomyfray, to give more focus to the query results (considering that a url like http://technorati.com/tag/mytagname is ultimately a query) that find nodes of the thread? Or is there something I missed? Bob

Hi Bob. What I said was that I was adding unique tags for specific threads of discussion. I thought this essay really belonged in the thread with Shelley's bbintroducingtagback so that's where I put it.

If you look in other essays, for example the ones about the WITW web service, you'll see some tags that are uniquely mine. You'll also find some essays that don't have unique tags. I don't have a good handle on when to create them and when not too just yet.

OK I'll admit I don't get it.

I can understand that a common tagging system can be used to track similar items (URLS, photos, blog posts, whatever) across different repositories. This is a good thing, consider me a convert.

However, if I understand it, what we're proposing here is to apply tags that are unique to a given 'thread' of discussion. In other words, you know that I am referring to a specific post on your blog because I use exactly the same tag. You want the tag to be unique, to disambiguate my reference to the post from a reference elsewhere. Hence the "nwn-" prefix, right?

Isn't this a namespace problem? How long before we get a prefix collision between your nwn- and someone else's nwn-? At that point don't we just revert to domain names as prefixes? And by that stage aren't we just re-inventing URIs?

Another thing: I thought one of the reasons why trackbacks were on the wane was because of abuse by spammers. If so how do tagbacks solve this problem?

Almost certainly I need to read more about this...

That's a good solution normand I thinking in doing the same thing