"Taggregator" … for Flickr & del.icio.us — with a bit of help from 10x10

Richard S has mailed the del.icio.us discussion mailing list, drawing our attention to http://oddiophile.com/taggregator/index.php?tag= ,

a nifty way of displaying results from del.icio.us and flickr under the same tag (just complete the 'tag=' parameter in the querystring).

He had wanted to implement just such a "taggregator", but oddiophile got there first.

Instead I did this with it: go to http://rich.headsnet.com/news/ and be redirected to the taggregator results for the word currently most used in the news (courtesy of tenbyten). This gives a wider social context to the tenbyten results, letting you see what some of the internet thinks of the things in the news.

I was also intrigued by Richard's reflections on the differences in tagging between Flickr and del.icio.us, particularly in the light of Michal's comments to my earlier post:

One immediate thing that struck me about the taggregator results is how the different domains encourage very different approaches not just to the choice of tags but to the whole idea of what a tag is for. Flickr users seem to feel able to be freer, often using the tags given to a single photo to form whole sentences. They also seem to be keener on providing synonyms for things. Maybe there's more of a feeling that the tags in flickr are for display? Maybe the sense that flickr is more fun lets people go mad? Maybe del.icio.us is full of data geeks? Maybe in del.icio.us everyone's suddenly getting tag fear and is scared of adding more? Whatever. Seems like Taggle won't be replacing Google anytime soon. On the taggregator evidence, an "uber-tag search engine" would say more about the psychology of the tagger than about the tag.