Hot on the heels of Singpolyma's Tagging Thesaurus project comes new taggy goodness in the form of a webservice from knallgrau, boldly dubbed tagthe.net. (These guys are seriously ambi.tio.us)

This is a simple webservice that helps you in tagging textual content on and off the web. There are two ways of using it:

1. by simply pasting a URL or a text in the fields below or uploading a file
2. by using the REST API

tagthe.net then returns a set of tags based on the textual content you specified.

The algorithms is far from perfect, but it's exciting enough to warrant attention from bloghackers and tagerati everywhere. They send results back as an XML document, which is fine for grownups. Those of us splashing about in the shallow end need a JSON(P) feed. Impressively, within 8 hours of my polite enquiry, they had a documented JSON feed up and running. That's what I call agile development!

This service could be a boon for people tackling the arduous task of retro-fitting tags to their blogs. It also has applications in helping you choose which which tags to apply with your social bookmarking buttons.

Of course, by way of quid pro quo, I've provided a version of my earlier TagOverlay experiment that uses tagthe.net as the source for the overlaid tags. It's somewhat stripped-down, in that it doesn't incorporate tag counts and the pop-up box thingy has been dropped since I'm still figuring out what that should do. Anyway, check it out (give it a click):

TagOverlay (tagthe.net)

Why not give it a roadtest too? Just drag this link onto your browser's toolbar and you'll have a handy taghunting bookmarklet to aid websurfing.

Here's the human-readable source.

For completeness, I've thrown together another version of the above, this time instead of tagthe.net (for generic tags) or del.icio.us (for your/someone else's tags), it just trawls through the current page looking for rel="tag" in the links:

TagOverlay (rel="tag")

Hardly rocket science, but it seems to be effective in picking up the publisher's tags. (And, as usual, the human-readable source is here.)

So, we've got no end of methods for finding tags on the page. If you've got any bright ideas about what to do with them, please share on the earlier post. We'd love to hear your brainwave, wishlist or taggy fantasies!

Filed in: tags, webtech, blogger-hacks, tagthe.net, bookmarking, bookmarklets