Raw Sugar trumps del.icio.us

Raw Sugar is an advanced Social Bookmarking system that John Tropea has been recommending for ages now. Somehow I'd still manged to ignore it but not anymore - this thing thing kicks ass!

While Feed Grazers have been appearing from every direction we're still crying out for del.icio.us to generate browseable tag hierarchies. But Raw Sugar is already on the case and providing both hierarchical tag clusters and tag similarity detection.

The latter feature will provide some solace to Alex Barnett who wrote recently about Solving Tag Hell. In fact Frank Smadja of Raw Sugar made an interesting comment to that post suggesting that the right approach to solving these problems is based on two points -

1. Let the "advanced user" define tag relationships
2. Use clustering and other statistical based techniques to infer tag relationships for the searcher and the less advanced tagger.
   

That second points hints at where they're going with hierarchical tag clustering. All we need now is that information in OPML format (I don't see anything about OPML in their API documentation).

I predict a new feed viewing service called Horse - because it looks like Raw Sugar could be the perfect fodder for Feed Grazers. Urgh!... ;->


Technorati Tags: opml, social bookmarking

Comments

[l.m.orchard]

A little confused... del.icio.us does offer suggestions for related tags, as in the sidebar on this page:

http://del.icio.us/tag/javascript

And, in the suggestions offered while posting a bookmark. It looks like the tag hell that needs solving are on services which don't yet analyze statistical tag relationships (ie. Flickr and Technorati).

[James Corbett]

Yes, del.icio.us gives us related tags but not doesn't present those relationship hierarchically AFAICS? That, as I understand it, is the innovation with Raw Sugar and the advantage of it as regards Feed Grazing.

Agreed, Flickr and Technorati have a long way to go...

[Bill Lazar]

Thanks for the very flattering post! Yes, we allow users to create hierarchy in their tagspace but if not we will do some gathering automatically. In the all-user space we combine the two.

As for organizing Flickr, you can (almost) do this with RawSugar today; looking at their feed format, they use media:category> instead of plain category> and we need to add this subtlety to our processor. Shouldn't be a problem since of course this opens a whole new application space for us.

Once it's in place (I'll post an entry in our blog) this is all you have to do: Create a separate RS directory for your Flickr account (we have no issues with multiple directories per user, and they're free) and enter the Flickr RSS feed in the Other Blog field on your Import and Sync your blog page (http://www.rawsugar.com/myaccount/import/blog, of course you need to be logged in). The you can get the Topic Navigator javascript (http://www.rawsugar.com/myaccount/4myWeb) and paste it into you blog template and give readers a convenient access to the entire collection.