Technorati Tag-Spamming a New Problem

Hmm.. noticed that the Technorati tag for 'dogs' has no useful pages, just a bunch of spam from a site with 0 incoming links. Looks like they should tweak their tag aggregator to filter out link farms and other such nonsense, if they want to be useful.

Perhaps a requirement for a minimum number of incoming links (elitist! they cry), or a mechanism to tag a blog as bogus or not human (anti-botite!).

Perhaps they could limit the number of posts from a single source in the aggregation (if there is enough other posts to fill out a page.) On the other hand, myself and Robert Paterson seem to monopolize the 'PEI' tag, because other people don't seem to use it as often.

Technorati does have a lot of potential with their tags system, if they can make the results pages usable, and can offer, say, RSS aggregation of a tags page without charging money for it (following the rule that you shouldn't charge for something that would take someone else 15 minutes with a PHP editor to clone, you'll only lose goodwill).

I've been thinking that a good and well-used tagging system would be a better replacement for CityFilter, which is now mostly some guy's Bloglines subscription writ large, because it includes posts by Islanders about everything, rather than posts about PEI or some aspect of Charlottetown specifically. (not a slam, just that I preferred the old MetaFilter-style format because the content was focused.)

So if, say, 30 people used the 'PEI' or 'Charlottetown' tag regularly, a person could load up the Technorati aggregation page for that tag and get a good idea of what's happening around here from the perspective of bloggers, rather than a bunch of posts about what some set of people had for breakfast that morning.

But there seems to be some work needed to smooth out the edges in Technorati's tags implementation first.

PS. To start using tags on your own blog go here, bookmark the link and when you choose that bookmark, enter your tags. Then press Enter, and the html code will be shown. Press ctrl-c to copy this, and paste it into your blog post. (or if you have a blog that supports categories you are probably good to go already.)
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Technorati, Tags, Collaboration