Tag Weeding: antispam, meaning, Swik and sharing tech info/support

I recently got a technorati ping notifying me that a term I coined last year- tag gardening – had been used by the TekTag blog. Anyone that has a blog knows about the problem of blogspam, which makes tag-gardening a lot harder. So what do you need? Someone to do the weeding…

Initially I thought the answer was something like manual laborer, or perhaps landowner if you considered my responsibility for this piece of cyberspace.  But now I have the definitive answer: I am the weeder.

I won’t go on about link spammers here, but I think we all agree on their place in the food chain.   One of the unfortunate  jobs here at TekTag is weeding out the link spam from the good links.  Just like in the real world, sometimes we pull out good stems by mistake; sometimes we miss patches; but overall our tedious labor works.

Of course if you’re going to do some weeding, you probably also want to plant some seeds, which is exactly what the blog post created. Anyone that uses the term tag-gardening is likely to get my attention… Its a scarcity/long tail thing – use a seldom used term and the originator is going to respond. Of course eventually power laws kick in and the person that thought of a tag is probably forgotten…
So what is Tek-Tag exactly?

The idea behind TekTag is to provide a place where users can find useful technical information – or Save, Search and Share, as we now say.  What will make TekTag take off is users like you; people like you will find and save information that you find useful.  So instead of simply using Google to search, you and/or Google will search TekTag, which is target rich and has lots of metadata.  We use social bookmarking as our foundation because it’s the right paradigm.

So here’s how you might use TekTag:

1) Save your own technical bookmarks – If you are a developer, consultant, IT team member, use TekTag to save links to important bug data, useful tips, security alerts, whatever.  Sure you could use del.icio.us to do it, but you might prefer some of TekTag’s specific tech-info-related features.  You can keep them private, or make them public for all to see.

2) Share and send useful bookmarks to others – Maybe you have a group of people – customers, co-workers – that you want to disseminate data to.  A great way to do it is save them on TekTag, then share them with the group.  Right now on TekTag you can e-mail them or have them put you on their watchlist.  Soon you will be able to save bookmarks for an individual and have it show up in their “inbox.”

3) Search – You might be looking for something very specific – on Linux, or MySQL, or fill-in-the-blank technology.  With TekTag, not only can you find these types of things in our target rich environment, but you can also look at the ratings and reputations of the people who saved them.

4) Browse – Maybe you just like staying in the loop.  If so, you can subscribe to one of our many RSS feeds and just see what pops up.  The Linux feed, say.  Or the PHP feed.  You can also see what’s popular with our “Catch of the Day” feed.

Unfortunately TekTag is still suffering from spam, though there is some potential value there. I would advice the folks behind it to check out Swik (“the free database of open source projects”) from SourceLabs too, elements of which have a family resemblance to TekTag approaches.
disclaimers: SourceLabs is a client, and we’re fans of Alex Bosworth.