For those of you unaware, Engadget put on a new face this week and restructured the way stories are found on their site. As part of this new design they began sculpting links with a technique that I’m dubbing URL graffiti. Say what?

They are engaged in a brilliant new system of taggery that shows the maturity of blogs that have thousands of items of content and want to gain the value that they often represent. One method that they have chosen for this is filtering with user chosen tags (graffiti) attached to the end of a tag URL. Example: http://www.engadget.com/tag/att,3g,sony

Why is this brilliant?

It shows a step forward by Engadget and their designers to finding solutions to create value from the long tail. For the public and their own writers there is now an ability to treat all of this content as a reference system. You could also call it a knowledge base, library or archive. Whatever your chosen term, this simple approach to content filtering is hot.

What does it mean?

Access to an entire body of work via multiple tags can begin to yield better search results without forcing a user into a situation where they need to use an ‘advanced search’ feature. These are usually blocks of form elements that easily overwhelm a user’s sense that they can find what they are looking for with ease and underwhelm them with your information architecture skills.

Take the full example URL above with graffiti as an example – then click these three links with varying tag graffiti on the end of them in succession:

1. http://www.engadget.com/tag/att // All ATT tagged content
2. http://www.engadget.com/tag/att,3g // All ATT and 3g tagged content
3. http://www.engadget.com/tag/att,3g,sony // All ATT and 3g and Sony tagged content

As the results wane you are given a better picture of content within Engadget’s archive that meets the tag requirements. In this purest form it is advanced search functionality without the mess.

How to use it?

I found this feature because Engadget was already using it in posts. Their writers can use it to create a better picture of previously written content for users that click through. It can also be used by them as a an internal search capability for research on a topic. When you have multiple authors the chances are high that at some point there is another post or a few within the corpus that is similar and a can be used for reference.

In this current iteration this feature for users is a bit limited. Users can tack on their own graffiti to the URL and get results for these topics, but it is more of a command line interaction. It is powerful but not very user-friendly.

How can URL Graffiti from Engadget be improved?

This is a powerful system for content filtering that needs just a few tweaks and can become a ridiculously valuable to the publisher and to users.

1. Autodiscovery feed added to page
2. Link to this feed in the top section
3. Ability to add a ‘.rss or .xml’ to query for feed access
4. Button to change tag search to ‘OR’ instead of  ‘And’ to increase results pool
   1. Currently all searches are ‘AND’
   2. Ex. ATT and 3g and Sony
   3. New would allow ATT or 3g or Sony
5. Text input box with URL graffiti loaded in it for editing to add new tags
6. Number of results displayed on page

Below is a comp of some of these changes added into the interface. By no means is it perfect but it is a good start to adding some additional value to users. Click the image to see full size.

For your next client or startup keep this URL graffiti approach in mind as an efficient way to solve content filtering. If it is built in from the beginning you can ensure that you are creating a continued value, even if diminishing, for your content. Let your users throw some graffiti on your work.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

URL Graffiti From Engadget is a post from: TechStartups.com