The API returns official NYTimes.com tags that match your search string. Even better, it ranks the results from most commonly used tags to least. That means you can quickly see what’s making news, how a company’s name has evolved, or which Baldwin brother currently has the biggest spotlight.
The Times has some powerful dictionaries underlying their data, which makes the metadata more powerful, e.g. it allows you to disambiguate tags like Turkey (the country vs. the bird). They also clearly have bigger fish to fry. As the blog post says
We see our tags as a contribution to existing metadata discussions and efforts, such as Freebase, Topic Maps, Fuzzzy and similar projects. If TimesTags can also spark a movement that advocates standardized tags for news sites, so much the better.
The Times does tags
The New York Times continues to innovate. They have announced the TimesTags API. What is this?
The Times has some powerful dictionaries underlying their data, which makes the metadata more powerful, e.g. it allows you to disambiguate tags like Turkey (the country vs. the bird). They also clearly have bigger fish to fry. As the blog post says
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