Technorati through the 8th Dimension

Technorati needs to add some more dimensions. They have two that I'm aware of at present:

• Authority
• Time

This looks remarkably like Google's dimensions:

• Pagerank
• Time

Now, this is good if you're doing keyword searches on stuff that is keyword friendly... but it breaks down eventually. The focus on one single metric also tends to encourage gaming of the system, sometimes known as spam.

There are many other quantities of a page that could be measured, and made externally available as a control adjustment, especially the spam dimension.

To add further value, Tagging is a way of adding dimensions, but it's binary... present or not. The worse problem is that the source of the tag is limited to the author... which invites more gaming of the system again. 8(

It would be far better if the following things happened:

• Provide a way for the audience to tag content
• Provide a way to include a number with the tag (as in 0% kokeshi for a picture of a dog named Kokeshi, for example)
• Make this type of metadata available for mashup
• Build a standard for sharing this type of metadata
• Figure out how to use someone elses public facing metadata in search results.

Now, I've just thrown out some huge challenges, but I'm fairly certain they can all be done. The question for me is really about who's going to do it, when it'll happen, and why.

I for one would like to be able to search for all non-spam security blog entries made in the past 24 hours related to keykos or eros. I'd be willing to then tag them to help other people see less noise, and thus a better signal/noise ratio.

I'd be willing to bet a whole lot of people would be willing to be meta-editors, if it were cheap and easy.

Let's build some new tools, and see if we can actually make the world a better place, in spite of ourselves. ;-)

--Mike--