Technorati launches "tags" but makes them more complicated than they have to

Dave sent a mail announcing Technorati Tags today. Here is their help page. Technorati: Using Technorati Tags. It sounds like a good idea to have users set their own metadata tags and let the server worry about normalization of the database. I have long been against heavilly structured metadata systems that require everyone to use a pre-defined list of tags. Tagging is a pain enough without having to live in someone else’s taxonomy. So Self Taging is good. Then apply some server logic to figure out which tags are probably related or “close enough” to allow people to find things even if they aren’t tagged explicitly with the right words you are using to search.

The only gripe I have is that the presenation of the idea was overthought and shrouded in a bunch of techno babble. I got the impression from all the various threads that I had to start doing something new, adding a new tag to the HTML of my posts. But after further research, what they are really talking about is sucking up the category tag and allowing users to search on categories. MT already has tags if you are categorizing your posts! So I don’t have to do anything new.

Now on the search part that would be cool. What I would like is a javascript that will pull down posts, pictures, etc. not on keywords but on “tags” or “categories”. for example. BioDiesel. What if I wanted B100Fuel to have an auto generated list of posts from around the web on biodiesel? But not every relevant post has the word biodiesl in it. It may be just a pointer to something diesel related. Or crop related. Or tax realted? So working at the category level would be good. I will poke around for that. I bet it is out there somewheres.