Clarifying tags

Dave said:

tell us how you support open protocols and we'll figure out how to plug you in. 

We use the existing HTML standard rel attribute for link relationships and add a new link type "tag".

Niall said:

Adding rel="tag" to any link should be enough to build a tag library for links off the link text. Technorati instead grabs the last part of the URL after the "/" and treats it as a post tag. I was hoping for a decentralized del.icio.us implementation.

This is a misunderstanding of what rel on a link means. It defines a relationship between the page containing the link and the linked page. We have defined a new value "tag" which means 'treat the linked page as a category tag'. It is the link itself that has meaning here, not the link text you use.

If you use the pages at http://technorati.com/tag/ as your destination, we know what this means. You could also use another domain that has tag-specific urls, like flickr, del.icio.us, or wikipedia. The assumption the technorati spider makes is that the last path component of the url is the tag, so http://apple.com/ipod would even work.

We think that linking to our tag collator is a useful thing to do here, but they are your links and you can do as you wish.

This was never meant to be a replacement for delicious, but a complement to it. del.icio.us is a great way to label links with tags. The new rel="tag" enables you to label your own blog posts with tags.