LibraryThing’s John McGrath has debuted a new site, TagsAhoy, with a wonderfully simple idea: searcing your tags across multiple sites.

Cross-site tag searching is nothing new; sites like Technorati do it all the time. But TagsAhoy searches your tags, not someone else’s. If you tag a lot, it will come in handy. And you’ll wonder why nobody thought of it before.

So far, TagsAhoy searches LibraryThing, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Gmail, Squirl and Connotea. More will come, and John has promised tag clouds and other cool features. Pattered somewhat on the spare design of another of his sites, Wordie (“LibraryThing for words,” “Flickr without pictures,” etc.) TagsAhoy is super-simple to use.

We at least applaud the name. It’s clunky in the way “LibraryThing” is clunky. Or was. Now all the “-Thing” names are bought up and my sub-Lovecraftian joke is almost trendy. We confidently predict “-Ahoy” will be the next “-Thing”*, or even “-cio.us”, “-r,” “-ster” and “-Space.”**

John recently moved to New Jersey and will be transitioning gradually off LibraryThing work over the next few months, as we look for a new PHP programmer with systems skills (job announcement to be posted soon). With TagsAhoy and whatever else his fertile mind creates, Abby, Altay and I wish him well.

*Research suggests PornAhoy.com is an expired domain. It sounds like a site for people who enjoy watching naked people on boats very very far away. There’s a market for everything.
**John suggests a site of just Web 2.0 suffixes, ThingAhoySter.

Labels: 1