“Common” Tag Supported by Yahoo!

Yahoo! announced a few days ago that they are supporting the “Common” tag, a microformatting tag that is much like the meta keywords tag, except far more difficult to implement.  Why would Yahoo! support something as cumbersome and easily exploited as this? 

Yahoo! believes that semantic tagging is the future of the web and will allow the development of more intelligent applications for distributing content around the net. Critics are already asking why this tag has been supported when it is more complicated to implement compared to other widely supported tags, such as the rel-tag, which is quite similar already. And no word on whether Google will be supporting this microformat.

Where the common tag will be particularly useful when it comes to web content tagged with names that can have various meaning. For example, if a piece of content is tagged “jaguar” is it referring to the car, the animal or the operating system? The new Common tag will add semantic meaning to tags which means it will make it easier for machines to understand content that is tagged with the Common tag; allowing web content to be more discoverable and enabling more useful applications to be developed for searching, browsing and aggregating content across the web.

The tag was recently developed by several companies including Yahoo!, Freebase & Zigtag to name a few. For more information about the Common tag, visit the Common Tag official site.