Tageru: Bringing a Bit of Control to Seven Tagging Services

We’ve written many times about the cool tools from SurfWax including ShopEasier and WikiWax that both use their LookAhead technology.

Here’s another tool (beta and we noticed missing many personal name tags) that might be of interest to those of you who utilize various tagging services to discover new material and/or are interested in folksonomy development.

It’s called TagerU and like the other tools we’ve written about uses LookAhead technology from SurfWax, it provides a vocabulary of tags (presented as you enter letters) from six well-known tagging services and Wikipedia. Of course, every tag does not have results at every service. TagerU would become even more useful if they could list if a tag was used (results were available) on one service versus another.

The services used are:

+ 43Things

+ Delicious

+ Digg

+ Flickr

+ Furl

+ Wink

+ Wikipedia

When a tag of interested is discovered as you enter letters into the search box it takes just one-click to search the words/phrase using one or more of the tagging services. In a sense, TagerU takes hundreds of thousands of tags and offers what a searcher might expect to see when using a traditional controlled vocabulary. In one tool you’ll see both the strengths and weaknesses of tagging. It’s also interesting the continuity of tags from one service to the another. As we mentioned earlier, a must for those researching folksonomy development.

Btw, many terms are rotated when using Tageru. In other words you would find
“Chicago Public Radio” by beginning your typing with Chicago or Public or Radio.