RawSugar's hierarchical navigation

RawSugar is one those social media services that takes a few run throughs to figure out. Tagging and social networking services are the current hot category, with many variations on a theme. Check out TechCrunch if you want to keep up with all the new tag/social startups. RawSugar differentiates itself from del.li.cious and other services in that it applies manual, human tagging to organize directory entries by multiple topics--hierarchically. Companies like Endeca provide hierarchical navigation, but not for free or as social media.

Users can provide their own taxonomy, but in the background RawSugar takes all the information and applies hueristics to provide the best classification, according to company CEO and founder Ofer Ben-Shachar, who previously founded NetDynamics (an early Java application server). RawSugar that can organize their personal directories using tag hierarchies, and share them with other users. The free, ad supported service is aimed at Web publishers and bloggers who can benefit from improving their site with guided navigation via hieararchies. Users can give each Web page multiple tags, annotate pages and create hierarchies for more guided search experiences.  

RawSugar has been available in beta and so far has over 2,000 directories. Part of the business model is sharing revenue with publishers, similar to what Google is doing with AdSense, Ben-Shachar said.