Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.

Blog Top Tags Widget
Display your top tags with the Blog Top Tags widget in a beautiful cloud formation (or the top tags of any blog). Copy the code snippet below, replacing {URL} with your blog URL. Note: when you first install this widget on your blog, it will take us a few minutes to build a custom widget with your blog's top tags, but then after that we'll keep it up to date for you.

As for competitors, Gada.be seems to focus on the quantity of the sources searched (200 sources), and seeks to help categorize the sources you search (you can search "Amazon", or a more vaguely, a "geeky" category, for example). Wink relies gives you search results that users have bookmarked, and if it can't find anything bookmarked, it backfills with Google results.

I don't mind this as much as I minded SmartTags when Microsoft was attempting to do them (before I was an employee I argued voiciferously against them, along with many other people in the community because we didn't want anyone to be able to use our own words for doing this style of advertising). Choosing to do it on your own blog only gets rid of most of my objection. I still don't like these kinds of ads, though, cause for someone who doesn't know the Web very well you can't tell these are ads at first.

I don't notice them much. When I do see them though they really annoy me - they look far too much like hyperlinks and distract far too much from the content.

It's odd as well that they never feel relevant. Just because a post mentions the word apple doesn't mean I want to buy one (the fruit or the computer). What tends to disturb me more though is forums that use this kind of advertising that I've been seeing a lot. That's putting ads in the middle of your users words and I'd consider it outright unethical.

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

Nearly half (47%) of all blog posts have an author-generated category or set of tags associated with the post. For this analysis, Technorati excluded generic or default categories, like "General" or "Diary", which some services put into each post if the author doesn't specify a particular tag or category. We only counted posts that used a non-default tag or category.

The blogosphere is multilingual, and deeply international

English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006.

Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly.

Chinese language blogging, while continuing to grow on an absolute basis, has begun to decline as an overall percentage of the posts that Technorati tracks over the last 6 months

Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and German are the languages with the greatest number of posts tracked by Technorati.

The Korean language is underrepresented in this analysis

Language breakdown does not necessarily imply a particular country or regional breakdown.

Technorati now tracks more than 100 Million author-created tags and categories on blog posts.

The rel-tag microformat has been adopted by a number of the large tool makers, making it easy for people to tag their posts. About 47% of all blog posts have non-default tags or categories associated with them.

But in a panel entitled "Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting tag clouds for grandma" at the South by Southwest conference here, a panel discussion with more than 200 in attendance was the place for some of the most clued-in taggers and fans of folksonomies in the world to vent about how they find the technology sorely lacking for true usefulness.

In general, the conversation went, tagging is a wonderful tool, but often doesn't meet users' needs because as it stands today, it leaves out too much context: What does the tag "afghan" mean? Is it a dog, a blanket, someone from Afghanistan?

That means, the panelists and audience members argued, that while tagging offers the promise of fully contextual content, it can still be too hard for users to find what they want, or to re-find something they've bookmarked or manually tagged.

The problem with tagging is that it requires the writer to manually tag their articles. This is a flawed requirement on any number of levels:

1) most users don't, won't, or have no idea what you're talking about. 2) humans are rotten at tagging. 3) humans are even more rotten at figuring out what tags OTHER people will look for the piece under.

On one hand tags work because they maximize participation with a simple user ask and the social use effects help rough standardization emerge around them.

But tags aren't a panacea, since they're excessively vulnerable to spam, and the items which should belong to the same categories will get different tags from different users. Which is it, "topixnet"? or "topix"?

1000Tags is different enough from MillionDollarHomePage that I think it will have a lot of sucess, too. They call it "the first commercial tag cloud". And that’s exactly what it it. You can purchase a tag, pay by the character and font size, and hope that a lot of traffic to your site is the result.

They are selling up to 1,000 tags. Tags can be exclusive (click the Star Wars tag), but cost significantly more, and they will only sell 50 of them. The remaining tags link to a results page with what appears to be an unlimited number of results

A taxanomy that is visitor generated

A navigator that shows pages by context

You have access to a nice tag cloud

More internal traffic as users click on tags

Valuable inbound links from our directory to your site

We can build tags automatically from search engine traffic

XML API access to your tag data

We've learned from the incredible success of tags, and brought some of the those same features into search, as well as expanding tag functionality. Now, if your search matches a tag, we bring in photos and links from flickr, furl, delicious, and now buzznet as well.

It's a list of keywords taken from the news feeds you specify. Larger fonts indicate a higher prevalence for an individual keyword. Using Cascading Style Sheets, you can customize almost every aspect of your TagClouds to make it match your website.