[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
cache at dowebs.com
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