Then each went to his own home

I’m very happy that a recent post titled «Tag history and gartners hype cycles» stirred up a discussion in the
folksonomy-blog-space that got some people musing about the state of tagging:

Paolo Valdemarin:

4 years later I’m still wondering when will we get some truly advanced tagging tools.
Where are all these tools to manage all my tags (on Flickr, on del.icio.us, on technorati, in my RSS reader, on my blog, etc), to help me organizing them, to allow me to gain more advantages from tagging? (maybe they are somewhere and I simply have not found them yet…)

Matt Mower:

I have been surprised, that [...] the state of the art in tagging seems firmly wedged in 2003. Surprised because there seemed [...] to be a momentum building in the use of tagging

David Weinberger:

Tagging like it was 2002

Thomas Vander Wal:

In the consumer space thing have been stagnant for a while, but in the enterprise space there is some good forward movement and some innovation taking place
[...]
While there are examples that tagging services have moved forward, there is so much more room to advance and improve. As people’s own collection of tagged pages and objects have grown the tools are needed to better refind them.

Vander Wals post is very very insightful and worth a read: He sums up the tagging history and expresses a few brilliant ideas how to proceed.

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In beginning of May at webtuesday, I gave a presentation about the current problems with tags and what could be done to improve that situation.
Corsin was kind enough to record the presentation (thanks a lot for that!). I’m not completely happy with the presentation – especially the part about tag history was way too long. I’d suggest to skip that part and read my blog post about this subject (this part probably works better in a blog post than in a presentation). Ah, and the last 3 or 4 minutes are missing but you don’t really miss something.

For last Webtuesday I gathered a few historic data of the «tag movement» (that got very quiet in the last two years).

History of tags

Update September, 2007: Thomas Vander Wal wrote a very good roundup on the tag history.

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