Adventures in the Jungle.

Building TagJungle has been quite an incredible experience. It’s a lot of fun to see a concept turn into a reality! Tomorrow marks the first time that TagJungle will be displayed to a large group of people in order to get their feedback. We’ve invited several people to a luncheon where we will explain TagJungle and give them a live demonstration of it. I’m both excited and nervous about this. I’m very excited about being able to unveil our ‘baby’ to this group and show it off a bit. I’m also nervous because it’s one of those moments of truth – what if they all hate it? Now, I’ve shown it to enough people that I’m sure that won’t happen, but the fear of it is still there. It will be interesting to hear what they all think about it.

Several people have asked me to give a better description of what TagJungle is. We have been carefully guarded about disclosing too much about it, but we are coming up on our private beta so the curtains will be coming down soon anyway. So – here goes:

TagJungle utilizes a ping feed, just like Technorati does, to receive notification every time a blog post is made. We grab the new post and process it through our relevancy engine to determine what keywords are RELEVANT in the post. That is, we are able to figure out exactly what the blog post is ABOUT, not just what words are in it. We tag each post with the relevant keywords and with a number that indicates how relevant that keyword was. So, for the non-technically inclined- we build a list of what words the post is about and assign a value that indicates how important a word is in the post.

When you use the TagJungle search engine, you are able to search the entire blogosphere based on relevancy. That is, you can find all the posts that are ABOUT ‘Apple’. The search results are sorted by most recent, and are not given priority if they were written by a popular blogger. You can subscribe to a feed of the term ‘Apple’ just like you would subscribe to someone’s blog. The only posts that will ever come through that feed will be all about ‘Apple’. In addition to that, you can adjust the minimum relevancy – or you can control to what degree the posts are about ‘Apple’.

By doing this, you have an opportunity to read any blog post that is about ‘Apple’ without having to know who the blogger is or without having to do a keyword based search (which would return all posts that simply said ‘Apple’ in them). TagJungle has a page for every term that is ever relevant in the blogosphere and you can subscribe to any of them.

Most search engines have an ‘authority’ system that determines the order in which results are displayed. This is basically a popularity contest based mostly on backlinks. There are multiple problems with this authority system. If an extremely popular blogger once mentioned ‘Apple’ in their blog, their post would come up towards the top of your search because they are popular. This is generally pretty useless and inhibits you from being able to find what you are actually looking for.

In TagJungle, authority is based on passion for a topic and does not affect the default sort order. TagJungle strives to identify for you who the most prolific bloggers are on the topic that you are searching for. If you are searching for ‘Crochet Hooks’ TagJungle will not only give you all the blog posts that are actually about ‘Crochet Hooks’, it will tell you what bloggers have written the most posts about ‘Crochet Hooks’ – or, it will tell you who in the blogosphere is the most authoritative for ‘Crochet Hooks’. We do this to help you find bloggers that are writing passionately about the topics that you are interested in.

We also do it for the bloggers – if you were to create a new blog today and write 6 posts about horses, it would probably be several months before a fellow horse lover would ever find your blog because of the authority systems they use. With TagJungle, fellow horse lovers will be able to find you almost right away. Your blog posts will be passed through the feed for ‘Horses’ to the people who are interested in reading blog posts about ‘Horses’. Additionally, you will very quickly show up as an authority for the term ‘Horses’, which will allow fellow horse lovers to find your blog and join in your conversation.

While this is pretty cool and will let both bloggers and readers easily and quickly connect, the really cool thing in TagJungle is Canopies.

A Canopy is an aggregate of related terms that you are able to build yourself and subscribe to. If you want to get a feed or build a page of all the blog posts that are talking about MP3 players, you can build a Canopy for it. Your Canopy can include all the related terms such as: ‘MP3 Player’, ‘Zune’, ‘IPod’, ‘Portable Music’, ‘portable audio’, etc. A Canopy can include as many terms as you like. We help you begin building your Canopy by showing you all the related terms to whatever term you search on. Once it’s built, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for it, or view a page for it. Either way, the only posts that will come through are ones that are talking about the terms that you specified. In addition to that, we will tell you what bloggers are the most authoritative for the terms that you included in your Canopy.

There’s more, a lot more actually, that TagJungle does. Over the next few days I’ll write a few posts talking about some of the different exciting features that TagJungle has.

If you would like to participate in our private beta, just drop your email address at TagJungle’s HomePage – we’ll send you a username and password for the beta in a week and a half.

So readers, what do you think? Does TagJungle sound exciting to you? Will it potentially solve some of your problems with finding blogs and blog posts about the things you’re interested in? I’d love to hear what you think, please share!