Recently, Yahoo! announced its support and also its input into the creation of the new Common Tag, the new content labelling format for web pages across the Internet.
This new technology allows web publishers to make their content more discoverable and will allow applications that search and browse the web to become more useful as they will be able to find more specifically relevant content from the web.
Last year, Yahoo! launched it’s new product, called SearchMonkey, and this new Common Tag is supposed to support and work alongside this idea, to promote the use of structured data across the web.
The new common tag has been developed in order to help webmasters and Internet users to organise, share and discover content on the Internet.
Before the common tag was introduced the previous methods of tagging were found to be quite limited, as it was often found that single concepts could be represented by several tags and also some tags could have several possible meanings. For example, terms such as ‘mini’, ‘jaguar’ and ‘apple’ for example can all mean very different things so using these words as tags would not help to fully label a concept.
However the new Common Tag has been designed to iron out these problems, as it allows content to be tagged by a concept, that has been well-defined, rather than by a single word or phrase.
The way the Common Tag has been formatted means that useful metadata can be accessed that describes the concept and also how the individual factors are related to one another. For example, metadata about the concept ‘Barack Obama’ would include the fact that he is the president of the USA and even that he is married to Michelle Obama.
Yahoo!’s Researcher, Peter Mika, has said that the new tagging system will allow the content of web pages to be more easily understood by machines, making searching and browsing these pages simpler.
The organisations that have had an input into the development of this new tag have also developed a range of services to make using the feature and tagging their pages as simple as possible. For instance, Zemanta offer automated tagging tools, Faviki and Zigtag, social tagging services, allow end users to tag content with the Common tag, and web publishers also have the option to manually tag their own content.
The new Common tag has been designed to help everyone, including end users, web publishers and web developers get the most out of the content on the web and as more people use the tag this content will become more discoverable, connected and engaging.
For more information see the Common Tag Press Release and also the website.