[Developers] Blog properties and ping idea

[Jason Douglas]

On Aug 22, 2007, at 8:00 AM, Kirrily Robert wrote:

> My
> question is, what do you do with them once you've got them?
>
> The HTML output onto the blog looks like this:
>
> <a href="http://infotrope.net/blog/tag/barcamp" rel="tag">barcamp</a>
>
> That rel="tag" is what tells Technorati etc that this is a tag and
> makes them index it appropriately.  Would we want Technorati to index
> freebase topic tags?  I don't see why not.  So all that would change
> in the output would be the URL.  Would we keep the Freebase tags
> separate from the ordinary blog tags?  Maybe.  You want people to have
> a sense of what they'll get when they click on it, so you don't want
> them all just mixed up together.


I agree that it would be confusing to change the default behavior of  
showing similarly tagged content from the blog you're reading.

So just brainstorming some ideas...

1. You could add a small icon after the tag, kind of like the  
"external link" or the "opens in new window" ones, that links to the  
Freebase topic.

2. Or a pop-up on mouse-over that shows a "preview" of the topic  
based on Freebase properties -- maybe like the fly-out you see in  
auto-complete on freebase.com -- with a link inside to Freebase.

3. A combination of #1 & #2... which is basically what Snap.com does  
(see Read/Write Web or Techcrunch)

4. As you mentioned... Freebase topics referenced could just be a  
separate listing from tags.  This seems like more work for the  
blogger and visually it could mean some repetition and clutter.   
However, they would be serving a different purpose (related content  
vs. look-up/reference) so maybe it's OK.

However, I personally like the idea of treating the Freebase link as  
a "normalized" tag (as opposed to a completely independent thing)  
because I would hope that some day the connections within Freebase  
could be used to provide a much more compelling way to browse tags &  
related content within a blog.  There has got to be a better way than  
this:
	http://www.dailykos.com/alltags

:-o

-jason

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