[thelist] smart tags

Keith cache at dowebs.com
Thu Jul 5 16:11:17 CDT 2001


> I am sorry I might have missed the smart tags thread.
> I am trying to understand smart tags -
> what are smart tags?
> are they in I.E. and Windows XP (what is windows xp?)
> what are the advantages and disadvantages of using
> smart tags?

Smart Tags is an "old" idea in web terms. I first installed it over a 
year ago and I believe I got my copy from NBCI (or a similar news 
site). It ran on IE5 and had an on/off toggle switch on the toolbar. 
Whenever I went online IE would update it's "dictionary" of 
keywords.

Originally there was a global Smart Tag database. People could go 
there and register a keyword much the same way that you'd do at a 
search engine site. Then when you loaded a page containing that 
keyword the word would display in a different color. If you moused 
over the word you'd get a short definition that looked like a large 
tooltip. If you clicked on it you went to the site associated with that 
keyword.

Sounds harmless? Smart Tags were promoted as the wave that 
would retire search engines. Well, things went sour. The porno 
crowd of course submitted "as" as a keyword with an ambiguous 
tooltip and a link that took you to some site that spells "as" with all 3 
characters.

The next incarnation, the one I tried, was licensed to portal 
websites. They controlled the keywords. The idea was that if you 
were a subscriber or regular user of women.com you would 
appreciate the definitions and links that they provided. Sounds 
reasonable. But the word "cosmetics" could end up being 
highlighted 20 on a page and would be highlighted on every page 
on this planet, and the third time that happened - blink - the user 
turned off Smart Tags, never to turn them on again.

Time passes and it looks like Smart Tag technology is dead. Enter 
the Evil Empire. Up in Redmond they brag that they will do anything 
to capture market share short of killing people (they don't brag 
about having done that so use your own imagination). With typical 
M$ arrogance they re-engineered Smart Tags and embedded it in 
their new XP O/S due out this fall.  This time M$ would control the 
global database and sell keywords to sponsors. Of course they 
would retain the keywords they wanted and link to their chosen 
sites, "Linux" to site listing all known and unknown server breakins, 
"database" being defined as "SQL7" and "multimedia" being 
defined as "Windows Media Player" with no mention of real.com or 
quicktime.

M$ claims that they dropped the idea for XP due to complains from 
corporate partners. Three days before that announcement the 
appellant court unanimously upheld M$'s conviction on all three 
counts for "abuse of monolopy", sending the case back to lower 
courts only to determine the penalty phase. The only real reason the 
appeallant court gave for vacating Jackson's order to break M$ up 
was that Jackson failed to substantiate his contention that 
"Microsoft continues the very abuses and shows every intention of 
continuing to practice those abuses". It's pretty easy to imagine a 
call from the only lawyer Bill will listen to, his daddy, advising a 
change of practice since the new lower court justice could rubber 
stamp Jackson's contention, and order, by pointing out that history 
proved Jackson was correct. Smart Tags is of course an abuse of 
the Windows monopoly and involves all three charges that M$ has 
been convicted of.

It's hard to believe that M$ was so "market-share-crazy" that they 
even gave Smart Tags a second thought. The problem with Smart 
Tags is that they assume the very arrogance that you find on many 
navigation schemes - that visitors really, really appreciate being 
bombarded with unrelated, unthemed, places to go after having 
found what they went looking for. Uhuh, people really, really like 
being jerked around by clueless web designers... and Smart Tags. 

But, the void filled by the Smart Tag scheme is still viable. AltaVista 
is unaware of 80% of the web and has no intention of improving that 
coverage, they are already getting max advertising $$. Something 
is being hatched in a developer's dream somewhere that will 
change the way we dowebs. It's just not Smart Tags, at least not the 
kind we've seen....

keith


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