OK, so here's a bit of an experiment...
Try clicking this link.
What you'll see is a breakdown of recent news, blog posts, bookmarks, and pictures related to the Wikipedia article on hackers, achieved by running a content analysis of the wikipedia page and searching for related content. Cool huh?
Tagalyzer.com takes a referring url and applies the Yahoo! content analysis API to identify the important keywords, and then uses those keywords to poll the Yahoo! News API for recent news, the Technorati API for blog posts, del.icio.us for bookmarks, and of course Flickr for pictures.
If you just link to the main page it will pick up your referring url automatically, but you can also grab the TagIt! bookmarklet (drag it to your browser links bar) for returning related content for any page you're browsing. Or, thirdly, you can craft a url like "tagalyzer.com/?referer=SOME_URL" and it will take "SOME_URL" as the referer. This is what I did above and it would be useful for building into your blog template for example if you wanted to add a link for each of your post permalinks.
Actually that quick how to also kinda summarizes the three use cases I see:
- Any page just links to tagalyzer.com and click throughs return related content from the referring page. Simple
- You craft a url with the referrer variable and add it to your blog template for each post, as I have here.
- You use the bookmarklet to discover related content as you traverse the interweb. Nice.
Of course there is a catch...it does require the referring page to be quite topic specific to get some good results. A link referring the home page of someones personal blog for instance would probably comes up with some pretty random content due to the generally non specific nature of most personal blogs...for this reason you'd be better off linking from your permalinked pages so the analysis focusses on the topic of a specific blog post.
Anyway, keen for any feedback. Useful? Buggy?
Tell us what you think...