Tagging and taxonomy - any advice?

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Permalink Reply by Keith Gregory on December 3, 2008 at 9:21am

We looked at Inform & I personally liked what they had to offer very much, especially from an advertising perspective.

I guess, though, my question would be what kind of CMS you are using, and whether that can support the ability to create new sections on the fly simply.

One of the things I have always stumbled with is for a niche b2b site that writes about one topic, how much nuance is there really with our content.

I mean, AviationWeek.com writes about mostly airplanes, manufacturers and defense. And we pretty much already segment our content out into 5 main channels or communities.

Now what we don't have, but which would be nice to have from an online ad sales perspective, would be the ability to quickly and painless create new niche channels for sponsors.

And then the other question related to CMS is editorial work flow, and whether your content, as your editors write and submit, can apply tags at that point. Or, if you are largely reusing print content, and tagging isn't as easy.

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Permalink Reply by David Warren on December 6, 2008 at 10:42am

Thanks for the insight Keith. We use Day Communique as our CMS, but I don't (yet) know the answer to whether it can easily support the ability to create new sections on the fly.

I agree with your point regarding the limited ability to segment content on most B2B sites. However, I do see some opportunity around entity extraction and aggregation of content around objects like companies.

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Permalink Reply by Sean Fulton on December 3, 2008 at 11:46am

We've been building publication web sites for 12 years and in that time have never found an automated tagging system that is truly worth the expense and effort involved. There have been some famous--and expensive failures--that I could share with you off-line, but in my experience, it all falls short of expectation.

When we build sites, we use an open source CMS called Typo3, but develop the sites with channelized content that is tagged by editors according to topic as the articles are entered. It's not automated and requires re-tagging if you go back and add an additional channel, but it is fool-proof and doesn't product embarrassing links or irrelevant content.

If you'd like more info message me and I will get back to you.

sean

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Permalink Reply by Robin Sherman on December 3, 2008 at 4:57pm

Try also posting this with the Information Architecture group.

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Permalink Reply by mark Poulalion on December 6, 2008 at 8:52am

We are at the emplamentation stage of deploying Nstein. I just finished 3 days of tme (taxonomy and authority files) training. I would be glad to share my findings along the way. So far I'm impressed.
We are also using them for our DAM and wcm. Should be a wild 2009.

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Permalink Reply by Stephen Laliberte on December 30, 2008 at 6:12pm

Hi David,

I have used and developed a number of automatic tagging systems. We have landed on a method that requires editors to tag content in contrast to full automation. This is old school. A key value add that any publisher brings to the market place is the taxonomy they develop for their franchise.

When I was with Byte Magazine, over our first 10 years we coined several hundred new words and introduced hardware and software taxonomies that still exist today.

The model that we use is to get the editorial staff to identify a taxonomy that is somewhat detailed but yet manageable. This is usually somewhere between 30 and 150 items. This list then goes into the content management system and drives the tagging options. The tagging is then used to drive navigation, related items, portals, microsites, and RSS. We apply the tagging to everything; articles, video, web seminars, white papers, blogs, forums, and events.

When you attempt to automate the editor, it may work 90 percent of the time. All you have to do is render a few foolish results and the reader will loose confidence in everything you do.

Steve

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Permalink Reply by Robin Sherman on December 30, 2008 at 6:52pm

Excellent response, Stephen.

Tagging, indexing, categorizing, and the like (all part of information architecture) requires an industry savviness and thoughtfulness that only editors, readers, and information architects can provide. It's more work for editors, but it is necessary.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Lamb on March 2, 2009 at 8:41pm

You might want to try Calais (opencalais.com) from Thomson Reuters. I work for the Calais initiative. We are seeing a lot of interest in it.

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