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How tagging could gain ground

November 29, 2005

Is the revolution stuck?

When I first heard about del.icio.us (and after that few days when I didn’t get it..) I thought: “This is revolutionary”. There were many things tags made possible that were just not possible until that day.

Joshua Schachter was the guy that invented tags (or at least that’s how the story is being told). Originally thought as a way to organize ones own bookmarks the social effect became obvious:

If everyone tags, the “community” profits.

Now, we have del.icio.us. Now we organize our bookmarks with tags. And our photos.
And our books, our games, our software, our tagging sites, and also your bulldogs, if you have any.

However, as we have tagged our whole life, what do we do with it? What is it good for?
I fear the tagging-revolution is about to calm. And I believe that’s because many people don’t see the advantages in tagging. I believe that many many things can be made possible by using tag-based systems. If we realized this, tagging would get some fresh air and eventually tagging gets mainstream.

Is it just me, or is the tagging revolution really stuck? I desperately miss new, visionary, inventive articles on tags.

  • To all smart people, where are your ideas?
  • To all programming geeks: Where are your algorithms, your “proof of concept” web services?

I could stop here with my article, but, hey, I don’t want to be the grumbling guy that sits and waits for new things coming up, so here I am, trying to expose my brain to you.
In this article I want to take a look at what areas tags are already strong in and how tagging could gain ground in these areas.
(more…)

Filed under: Clustering, Del.icio.us, Tags
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