Deadprogrammer.com is one step closer to the brave new world of the semantic web. Over the weekend I implemented Open Calais, an auto-tagging service from Reuters.
Being lazy, I haven’t tagged my content very well, and now, faced with with over a thousand posts, hand-tagging them is not something that I have the time for. I thought about creating a tagging interface and asking my readers to contribute to a folksonomy, but it would probably result in two valid tags and a million “viaggggrrarr” and “vikkoddinn” ones – spammers try to enter a lot of tags for some reason.
Calais is a neat web service. In a nutshell, you pass it the text of your posts and it returns an xml document containing tags in various categories. The set of categories is huge: RadioStation, MedicalTreatment, Movie, City, Person are just some of them. Unfortunately I did not set everything up correctly, and some of the more interesting categories did not get populated as I was indexing the old posts.
Meanwhile, my posts are a bit better tagged now, and you can take a look at a tag cloud of people and cities mentioned in my blog.
