tagthe.net blog

Get your JSON!

Thomas Hammerl — 2006-05-17T13:16:00Z

We've added JSON support to tagthe.net. Take a look at our API documentation for all the details.

Tag the Bird approved by Mozilla

Paul Alexandrow — 2006-05-11T07:16:00Z

Today Tag the Bird 0.9.1 finally got approved by Mozilla. You can now get it at addons.mozilla.org.

If you are already using Tag the Bird, please uninstall the extension and reinstall it with the file provided on addons.mozilla.org. Though this *should* not be nescessary, it makes sure that autoupdating your Thunderbird extensions now covers Tag the Bird too. You will always get the newest Tag the Bird version automatically.

Plus: Things look great as far as developing on v1.0 (truely searchable tags) goes. Stay tuned.

The youngest tagthe.net sprout: Tagview

Michael Sokolar — 2006-05-04T11:06:00Z

As tagthe.net flourishes yet another sprout is ready to blossom: Tagview.
The idea behind Tagview is to parse rss-feeds, send the content to tagthe.net and receive a bunch of tags for the passed text.
The first installation of Tagview parses knallgrau´s blogging service Twoday and displays different tag clouds for topics, persons and locations (therefore the address twoday.tagthe.net). In addition there are also clouds which display the tags from the last hour, the last 24 hours, the last week, and in future also the last month.
Since the tag quality of Tagthe.net has improved a lot during the last time, the tags are really matching the blog posts.

While Tagview only parses the twoday blogs, it is possible that in the future there are different Tagview installations, for example also for twoday.tuwien.ac.at, or any other Twoday blog.

I am currently working on a so called Trend Cloud feature for Tagview. This special cloud type displays the tags from, lets say the last week, in relation to the cloud of the week before the last week. Hence it will render quite interesting clouds, for example around easter the tag easter will be quite large, and so on.

Some more features are planned to come, so stay tuned and watch tagthe.net growing.

Tag the Bird 0.9.1

Paul Alexandrow — 2006-04-25T15:35:00Z

Here's a new Release of Tag the Bird:

Changelog:

Now compatibel with current Thunderbird version 1.5.0.2 (and all upcoming versions until - and not including - 1.5.1).
Message options are now in a separate cascaded menu.
Message options can be accessed via a message's contextmenu too (right click).
Message options can now be used in message windows (= windows only displaying a single message) and not in the main messenger window only.

Download: Tag the Bird v0.9.1
Edit: Please do not use this version anymore. See here.

I recommend you uninstall your 0.9.0 version of Tag the Bird, restart your Thunderbird, and install version 0.9.1 after that. It should not make any difference though.

Please note, that the same remarks as here still apply.

Because you're reading this, I guess you might be interested in the fact, that I'm currently in contact with some guys [1, 2] who have a couple of nice ideas about tags in Thunderbird and are willing to contribute. So stay tuned for great things to come!

Plus: I'm still trying to get TTB into the official extension list at addons.mozilla.org. At least I now found out what the problem is: Their upload form believes I want to submit an extension for the Mozilla Suite where TTB obviously will not work and the review fails. Guess I'll drop them a line.

We've bought ourselves a mansion

Thomas Hammerl — 2006-04-18T12:10:00Z

Because tagthe.net increased in popularity during the last months, the service is now running on it's own shiny new server. Why you should care about that, you might ask? Well, this means another significant improvement in performance and reliability. We think that's something to care about.

Better, faster, stronger

Thomas Hammerl — 2006-03-20T12:49:49Z

We are happy to announce that we were able to increase quality and performance of our tag extraction algorithm. The improvements have especially benefited the quality of topics for german texts but also the extracted topics for english texts are even more accurate now. You might think that that's the old "20% better taste!"-blabla but you need not take my word for it. Go and see for yourself.

Additionally we have introduced a parameter named count which let's you define the number of topics that you'll get from our webservice.

http://tagthe.net/api/?count=8&url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan

So this request will give you the eight most relevant topics that were determined by our algorithm given that at least eight topics could be extracted from the text. If the parameter is omitted tagthe.net will return a maximum of ten topics by default.

For the record: Feedback would be mucho appreciated!

Tagthe.net Wordpress Plugin

Michael Sokolar — 2006-01-20T12:33:29Z

If you are using the popular blogging software Wordpress, you are now able to add tags to your stories. Well, thats not a great innovation since there already exists a great plugin which adds this feature: The Ultimate Tag Warrior.
This plugin however uses tagyu, so the improvement we made ist that you are now able to choose Tagthe.net as tagging service.

A small example how you can add tags to your post:

Download
As mentioned before this feature is based on the already existing Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin which was developed by Christine Davis.
You can download the "improved" version of this plugin here:
UltimateTagWarrior (zip, 126 KB)

Installation
For wordpress 1.5.1+:

Copy the Ultimate Tag Warrior directory in you plugin directory (wp-content/plugins/)
Enable the plugin
Under Options/Tags/ select Tagthe.net as tagging service

Tagthe.net Thunderbird extension

Paul Alexandrow — 2006-01-19T14:36:00Z

Smi already mentioned that there's a tagthe.net extension for Mozilla Thunderbird under way. Well, actually it's been long ready, but not released, because the least you could say about those guys over at addons.mozilla.org is, that they are somewhat unorganized. (How else would you explain, that currently Thunderbird-extensions get their approval, that have been submitted way after Tag the Bird?) For this reasion we decided to make Tag the Bird available here, until approved by the Mozilla staff. Behold:

Download: Tag the Bird v0.9.0
Edit: Don't use this version anymore! There's a new one released.

Of course this is not at all a final version, and loads of features are still to come, but there's already a bunch of functionality available:

autotagging of your emails
splitting your tags by tagthe.net dimensions (topic, person, location)
adding custom tags
freely customizable external search engines
English and German localization
...

Requirements

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5

Installation:
Download the file. In Thunderbird go to Tools > Extensions > Install. Select the downloaded file and restart Thunderbird.

Important Notes:

For this is only a temporary place to host the extension until it's approved by Mozilla, there's no auto-updating mechanism available. Please make sure to always uninstall any previous version of Tag the Bird before installing a new one, to avoid unwanted behaviour as long as the extension is hosted here.
For tagging the textual content of your Emails is transmitted to tagthe.net's Rest-API via a secure connection. Please make sure you understood our privacy policy.

Bug-reports always welcome.

Screencast #1

smi — 2006-01-16T16:31:20Z

Finally we'll be adding screencasts to the site, check out the first one telling you how the service works and how you could use it with the del.icio.us plugin.

Tagthe.net del.icio.us plugin

Benjamin Ferrari — 2005-12-31T15:24:49Z

If you use del.icio.us together with the firefox browser, you can now enhance your social bookmarking expierence with our greasemonkey plugin.

What it does is suggesting tags for new posts you make to del.icio.us, by analysing the text you want to bookmark through tagthe.net.

As an example, here is what you get if you try to bookmark this blog entry:

Requirements

Installation:

After you have the greasemonkey plugin installed, rightclick on this link and choose Install User Script.

Java Text Categorizing Library

Thomas Hammerl — 2005-12-16T16:49:39Z

The language guessing done by this wonderful webservice is now achieved by our own fresh Java 1.5 library called the Java Text Categorizing Library (JTCL) which is distributed under the LGPL at sourceforge. It's a pure Java implementation of the C library libTextCat and can also be used for determining a text's topic which is planned to be integrated into tagthe.net in the near future.

Update: we are already using the topic guessing method that is described here to qualify a text in the following categories: politics, information-technology, sports, business, programming, movies, math and music, obviously only if applicable.

What's currently happening

smi — 2005-12-15T15:04:20Z

We are working on getting tagthe.net better and better by adding some further improvements until Monday. This includes:

improving tag quality with some basic statistics about what tags make sense and which not
displaying only the 10 best tags, with the possibility to show the others as well

Additionally we will provide some example applications that use tagthe.net next week, there will be a simple Greasemonkey script enhancing del.icio.us with suggestions from tagthe.net (I already use the alpha and I'm really happy with it) and a Thunderbird Plugin that let's you tag your email. Finally the screencast should show pretty well how they work.

Stay tuned.

Welcome to the tagthe.net blog

smi — 2005-12-13T17:22:14Z

Here we are going to talk about what is currently happening with tagthe.net and what kind of technology we are using and our future plans for world domination!