Jackson Fox

Jonas Luster has a WordPress plugin for the new Yahoo text extraction service. The plugin lets you tag your posts with terms extracted via the new service.

I found this via Ryan King who has some pretty good points to make why this isn’t all that useful.

First of all, I think it is functionally unneccessary. The plugin isn’t adding anything in terms of value or content. Why? Because any consumer of the content could do the exact same term extraction. In other words, these tags are noise…

He makes the point that the best thing about tagging is that it represents some human view of content. When a human classifies content, they have to place that content within the context of the knowledge they already have. When I posted this to del.ico.us, I had to decide how it related to other items I’ve already posted. Automatically extracted terms exist without this context and filtering.

This isn’t to say that automatic keyword extraction isn’t useful, but that it repsents a different kind of metadata about the document.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2005 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Weblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.