TUAW touts tags

Dan, I still don't think you're "getting" tags yet. What manual tagging are you referring to? When bloggers post, they add tags manually. When you type in a URL, you're doing it manually (at least, the first time).

However, once you have the rss feed, it IS automated, in that you only see the content you want. Text is indexable, yes, but the tool you use to index it is kinda important, yes? In this case, we're provided the category for you (see that list on the right), so you can customize your view as you see fit.

If you're talking "automated" like a spider or bot, I see your point. It would still require the use of a human to feed topical nouns, like iPod in there. But a blind crawl of the word "iPod" could potentially bring up stuff you wouldn't necessarily want to see, including posts where the word iPod is used, but it isn't the point of the post.

Text is indexable and very easy to automatically filter. Context, on the other hand, is incredibly difficult. Ask those guys at Microsoft working on voice recognition.

But if you have a better solution, I am all ears. Seriously!

Yes, #2, that's why I wrote this:
"It's very nice to provide access to content through the URL, but there's no reason it can't be done intelligently without having to tag everything manually."

#2 It was actually stated in the post why tagging is useful:

"This is of limited use if you can't subscribe to the tag, right?"

This way, if I want all my Leopord news I can just subscribe to the Leopard tag and skip over all that other stuff I'm not so much interested in.

Thats a really crappy sousaphone

I don't understand this fascination with tagging text. Text is text. It's indexable. It's very nice to provide access to content through the URL, but there's no reason it can't be done intelligently without having to tag everything manually.

nice addition, keep up the good work