PUBLIC MARKS with tag machinetags

The following maps are the first of a series that will be made in order to map out the distinct geographies of Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia articles (about half a million) are either about a place or an event that occurred within a place, and most of these geographic articles handily contain a set of coordinates that can be imported into mapping software.

It occurred to me that Wikipedia could be the basis of an all-purpose machine tag format to describe just about anything in the universe. Wikipedia aspires to have topics on everything, so creating tags associated with Wikipedia topics could be a foolproof way to disambiguate content.

We’re very excited about a little integration that the smartypants team over at Flickr have done with Open Library. If you happen to use Flickr and just happen to photograph the covers or insides of books you read, there’s an easy way to connect them to the catalog records we have on Open Library. You just have to add a thingy called a “machine tag,” the same way you would add any other tag, making use of a special format for the tag.

good to separate out machine tags and display them after displaying “regular” tags. That started me thinking about how best to display machine tags.

The following is a proposal for the use of machine tags for content related to Bucketworks. I’d love feedback from people familiar with machine tags, and people involved with Bucketworks.

how you can use machine tags with your next web app or even your blog. With Machinetag, a jQuery plugin, you’ll be able to search and display machine tagged content as trees faster than Colbert can crack a quip.

Astrotags are a new way to label your photos of space – they describe what your photo is of, and where in space that is. With your help, we hope that astrotags will let us build a beautiful montage of your astronomy photos.