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February 09, 2006

Tagging SXSW Bands

I met with from Austin blogger Prentiss Riddle and David Kivel from Austin startup Pluck for lunch yesterday to talk about a new initiative they have going. They run a Del.icio.us-like bookmarking application called Shadows, and their goals are to 1) make a more usable and ungeekified Del.icio.us (one that your Mom could use) and 2) to apply human filtering to search so that people can find what they want without SEO (search engine optimization) specialists fouling up the search results with their trickery.

Since they're from Austin, they've decided to focus their efforts on SXSW as a pet project. They've been courting bloggers who post about SXSW (like me) to get the word out about what they're doing. For the first part of this project, they've analyzed tags that people are using on sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us and Technorati and tried to to analyze the phrases most people are using and standardize the way SXSW 2006 bands are tagged.

They set up this page with their results that they call the "Official" (but I don't think this is SXSW-endorsed) Tags for SXSW 2006.

For example, these guys are adamant that we not tag SXSW with "sxsw" only. You must use "sxsw2006." They're sticklers, I tell ya. For a right-brained, rule-despising person like me, doing these things is great in theory but difficult in practice.

The long-assed unwieldy names of Austin bands are perfect for this kind of project. Take a band like (...And You Will Know Us By The) Trail of Dead. What do most people tag 'em with? According to the Pluck guys, it's "trailofdead."

Here's some other examples of superlong SXSW band names and the suggested tag equivalents:

• I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness: chosendarkness
• My Summer as a Salvation Soldier: salvationsoldier
• The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster: eightiesmatchbox
• The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower: blowuptheeiffeltower
• They Shoot Horses Don't They: theyshoothorses
• Viva l'American Death Ray Music: americandeathray.

Their next effort, which I'll be helping them with, is to find and tag the official band site and/or the MySpace site, any fansites, pages of Flickr photos, record label pages, and in-depth concert or album reviews, etc. for each of the SXSW 2006 bands (i.e. Aberfeldy). They're hoping that their pages become an additional third-party, human-filtered resource for people searching for SXSW information.

Posted by timothompson at February 9, 2006 01:21 PM