The intense interest in tagging reached a new level last week with the news of Technorati Tags (Flickr + del.icio.us + blogs). It's been well noted that the reception has been very positive ('Overall, Technorati tags are going down rather well' — Suw) and there have been some excellent, and varied, early posts appearing as a result of this initiative from Technorati (eg, foe romeo; Curiouser — see the comments). Ross's post is a rich and stimulating overview of the implications.
Suw adds that 'I do, as usual, foresee a couple of small problems' (the need to enter tags "manually", the well-rehearsed problem of synonyms and plurals). I note also that categories are not tags (Technorati: 'categories will be read as tags') and that 'many of us want to keep our categories broad because they are intended to help a reader see all of our posts, and we want to be inclusive rather than fine-grained. If that's the case, then tags commonly used by categories are not going to be very useful when aggregated' (David Weinberger). Also, as Peter Kaminski notes, we need to 'start tagging links instead of just pages; that would enable Google-like link aggregation of tags. I also look forward to seeing tags better syndicated in something like Easy News Topics (ENT), and tools for publishing an individual's complete tag set/folksonomy and ways to map that to other folksonomies or taxonomies'.
Caveats aside, we are surely witnessing here the start of something significant. What David Weinberger has spotted is that Technorati is now brokering tags and Ross's sub-headings (Networked Individualism, Emergent Intelligence, Social Discovery) themselves sketch out some of the exciting implications: 'just think about the emergent intelligence mechanism we are creating with a neural network overlaid on the net. … Links and snapshots bridge across places, physical and virtual. Tags are applied in the blink of an eye and patterns emerge from the crowd'.
(If I could tag the comments I leave on sites, then that would be a great advance, too. I would also like to see something like Tinderbox's Category Factory for tagging/categorising non-Tinderbox posts.)
