To the extent that mass tagging combined with significant algorithms of rank (such as Flickr’s interestingness) create smarter more intelligent filters, there will exist opportunites for smart companies to piggy pack off of the natural social tendency to tag and there will be real opportunties in adverstising, search, plus a whole host of other places for companies to derive economic value.

Companies need to address the what’s in it for me question of tagging and build tight communities and armies of volunteer taggers. Creating algorithms for human filters will create smarter more intelligent search. There is big money there.

Technorati’s on the forefront, Flickr’s on the forefront, but we haven’t seen anything yet.

…but it will grow off in directions we can’t even fathom.

Oh…and btw…I’m from Ojos (http://www.ojos-inc.com) and we are working on auto-tagging via face and text recognition on photos. I’m looking forward to see what happens when we combine manual and auto-tagging…is it going to make tagging more accessible to those outside of the ‘in the know’ tagging world?

(I had a conversation the other day where one guy says, “I like to have fun by messing around with tags.” and I thought, “Gee, I remember when it was fun to go to an Amusement Park.” LOL)

T.

I used to think pretty much the same way, I didn’t care about tags, or use them, now I’m thoroughly addicted. The reason why? I feel some measure of control over an Internet which is, let’s all face it, bloody huge.

It might not remain the way it is, in fact I guess a better way of doing it would be to tag visually. Imagine a service where you tag a picture of donald duck and it comes back with all the material on donald duck, old, new, pictures, prose, movies etc., If you don’t tell the average layperson it’s a tag, and pretty it up and make using them fun and easy, you’ve got it, which is why I say visually.

In Lakoff’s now famous 1987 book , “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things ” Lakoff tackles the notion of taxonometric relativity. It’s not in the least bit clear that Delicious (dots omitted at per the Buzz-Man, thank goodness!) is useful for anyone at this time because of this specific issue. Doubtless Messrs Veen and Jarvis (the Jeffs) have different cognitive mapping of subject matter and the overlap may or may not be useful to anyone else – including themselves!

The semi-innovative notion of letting “The Mob” do the tagging may yield some interesting results; then again … maybe not. You may remember ‘”The Mob” as those wonderful taxonomists who have at various times tagged all kinds of things: people as niggers, commies and more recently – Liberals or Maplethorpe’s and Gedde’s photographs as ’smut’ or “kiddie porn” … (need I pound this home?)

Early in the development of the web the library scientists at Yahoo categorized Messianic-Judaism within the Judaism category … creating quite the loud oy for a several days – Happy New Year to the people chuckling over this one … So if the experts even tag stuff wrong perhaps the voxpopulous will get it right – finally! I hope so. But I’m not holding my breath.

More likely the general public will get bored of ‘tagging’ pretty soon as I already have. With a few tagging utilities open on my screen right now – (Onfolio’s the best (thanks JJ) I’m not thinking this is a trend that’s here to stay. Or for you Ajaxically inclined folks lurking out there – perhaps tagging is best made into a background rather than a foreground task.

Put better and to paraphrase ex-Attorney General Edwin Meese (something I have never before felt remotely compelled to do) “I don’t need to define a fad … I know it when I see it …”