I was reading David Weinberger's blog today and saw two interesting things, the first was a dilemma he was facing with tag namespaces and the second was his idea of an 'ideal tag results page'. The first discussion centered around which website should be referenced when blog tagging (i.e using the rel="tag" microformat). A general theme in the subsequent comments was that his tags should first link back to his own blog site to show his tagged blogs and then from there provide links to other tag services (like Technorati, del.icio.us or Flickr).
I liked David's concept for his ideal tag results page where links to Flickr, del.icio.us and Technorati search results pages were easily accessible. The idea was so easy to implement I straight away put the conept to work within Reasonate. I added the links to these external sources just below any related tags on the search results page. Whilst I am not too sure of the usefulness of the Technorati link in the context of Reasonate the del.icio.us and Flickr links are very useful, you'll be surprised at the number of tagged bookmarks and photos out there.
The new Reasonate tag results with external tag service links (click to enlarge)
Of course the search is a little limited because unlike the two of the three forementioned sites (Flickr and del.icio.us) Reasonate supports multi-word tags. Consequently doing a search for 'archicad tutorial' does not work because such a term could never exist in these services as currently designed. I had debated with myself whether to allow/not allow multi-word tags. I eventually went with multi-word tags simply because in the design/construction industry there are many terms that really only make complete sense when considered as a single entity (such as pitched roof or gothic entrance). But in saying this the argument could equally stand that single words work better as there would be fewer, more concentrated tags which would lead to richer tag clouds. This will need more thought...