Shadows Rocks South By
A while back, we met with two members of Shadows, a "social bookmarking service" that integrates tags, blogs and an community-driven ratings system -- all in the name of helping us to "discover, share and manage information on the web." Case in point: if you clicked through an Austinist tag, you'll find other related tags (sxsw2006 blooging ist
austin blogs -- yes, blooging) that people associate us with, among other nifty things.
But, more to the point, we met with these guys because of the upcoming SXSW Music Festival, the pre- and post-coverage of which they're hoping to better integrate using a standardized tagging nomenclature.
Why is this important? Suppose you'd like to search for blogposts out there tagged with, say, Swedish pop/glam rockers The Ark -- who'll be playing our day party at Red 7 on Wednesday! You might look for tags under ark, or theark, or the_ark. Chances are that in most cases you'll find a few relevant things with each, but for all intents and purposes they're entirely different tags. Which, as you might imagine, can make it somewhat tricky and awfully frustrating to find everything you want, as it all exists in separate tag clusters.
And thus Shadows embarked on an extraordinary mission, to free the blogosphere from its shackles of non-conforming tagging insanity, using SXSW as their starting point. They've manually gone through every single one of the 1400+ bands listed, checking out each band's Myspace page, website and more for the most commonly used annotation, which they've then compiled into a single, exhaustively-comprehensive list:
[Shadows "Official" SXSW Tags]
It's pretty amazing, we have to say. And, in case we're not making sense (because we so rarely do), here's their description:
How would you tag a band with a name like I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness? Surprisingly, the most common tag is not iloveyoubutivechosendarkness, it's chosendarkness. Similarly, SXSW's most common tag is not sxsw06, it's sxsw2006.
Austinist suggests that you check out their neat new scheme, and adopt it for your own purposes, whether those be for Shadows, flickr photos, blogs, and whatnot. We'll be doing the same over the next few days, as we profile several of the bands that we're especially excited to see next week!
[Shadows Tags shadows austinist sxsw2006 theark]
* Photo from http://www.eminewmedia.de/
