Jason DeFilippo posts that Technorati have now added a ‘related tags’ feature. If you search for, say webservices you’ll see related entries for ‘web’, ‘google’, ‘soap’, ‘blogs’ and ’links’. Presumably the relationships are drawn by monitoring where tags have appeared together in pages.
This is a big step forward in technorati’s support for folksonomies. The usefulness of tags are considerably increased when you can draw out a list of ‘similar’ terms, and that option has certainly been one of my favourite features of del.icio.us. What I’d love to see technorati add next would be support for searching by multiple tags, and perhaps access to the relationships using the API. The latter would allow those of us thinking of building sites with user submissions organised using folksonomies to access a broader range of data when offering relational links, making our local folksonomy support more useful ‘out of the box.’