BarCampPune - Recoja tags specific content within web pages

Bringing tagging granularity to finer level so you can tag at paragraph or specific content, is an innovation that is likely to be very useful. What it does is to allow us to increase relevance of specific content, and not web page as a whole. This is greatly useful when you are consuming content in a aggregated manner (such as in news aggregators).

Shodhan Sheth and Anand Kishore are working on Recoja, which does precisely this thing. They presented their work on extensions to delicious tagging to facilitate this (via firefox plugin).

What Recoja does is that it allows you to tag a specific paragraph within a web, so that it is much more context specific. So when page is displayed (in firefox), it will show a small tag icon in green (cute, really!) and then when you move cursor there, it will highlight the tags put there.

There are some challenges. For e.g. the tags are external to content. So when content changes, their algorithms have to re-identify the content which was tagged. So the references which are created should be content based. (One algorithm: Choose the paragraph, checksum it and store it. Next time, try to identify this paragraphs. Use 2-3 trigger words to try to identify the checksum that needs to be search in current page.) But this algorithm requires a good amount of CPU power, as well as storage.

Now that we create tags at paragraph level, then this will basically allow us to add and share notes when collaborating - better than the way Web does. This is very much required for wiki systems!

(Questions asked: Can I use the same to tag audio/video content - specific segments?)

Good plugin!!