Technorati have expanded the power of their tags with the release of a related tags feature. If you search for the taxonomy tag, for example, you’re now shown all related tags – tags, folksonomy, blogging, blogs, weblog, blog, metadata, technorati.

Dave Sifry tells me that the way they are collating these synonyms and related terms is by seeing which tags are being commonly used together and then assuming that the most frequently used tag combinations are revealing a valuable relationship between terms. “I’m amazed that it works so well given how simple it is,” he says.

This is almost precisely what I suggested in January when tags were first released, and it’s a good step forward for tagging. One of the things I like about it is that it’s revealing the way that people are using tags together, rather than attempting to impose some sort of formal thesaurus. For example, if you look for the tag ‘language’, you also get the tags politics, English, projects, culture, writing, personal, and books, which I’m betting no one would have predicted in an imposed taxonomy.

Of course, I still have to remember to actually tag my posts…