Earthling

Because not everyone follows the "folksonomy" discussion, here's an incomplete snapshot of the current state of things. Right now, in most applications that offer tagging, it's a free-for-all. You can attach whatever word you want to your content, and you can tag whatever content you want. It's *your* overflowing costanza wallet, not someone else's, so if you want to assign the word "dog" to an article about cats, or "funny" to something inappropriately sad, that's your prerogative. But right now, although tagging is all over the place (check out Travis' fairly recent but not exhaustive list in the comments here) the idea of using tagging instead of some other form of organization has not quite busted out into functional, standard, and common mainstream usage. It's at the stage where everyone is speculating about how it will change when it does hit the mainstream. What will a smart tagging-organized application look like when there are millions of users banging on it, rather than a few hundred thousand?

There's some concern that the current system leads to abuse or negatively impacts the user experience in several ways. For example:

• People who try to promote their stuff by spamming the tag system with repeated use of their chosen tag.
  
• People who try to trick you into seeing something you didn't want by tagging it in an enticing or misleading way.
  
• Inability to find what you want, because you can't look in to someone else's mind and know how they categorize things.
  
• Open tagging gets out of control. If left to their own devices, most people are sloppy, duplicative, and make bad choices for how to classify things.
  
• Too many tags in ones index creates a useless index.
  
• It's hard to keep track of, let alone sell ads on a zillion individual tags that all mean something similar.

I agree with some of these but not others. I'm not going to take on all of these potential issues, though I do think the more important ones are solvable. Here are a few of the counter-points: Allowing users to tag as they see fit makes the system incredibly personalizable and customizable. You get to pick the index for your filing system, instead of being handed a list of labels. You curate your own collection of stuff, because only you know exactly why you wanted it and how it fits into the rest of the stuff you have. And not knowing how someone else categorizes things only encourages you to sort through their files, if you are the curious sort. It's up to the tagging platform to help make it easy for you to expore the work of others.

For some reason, I'm really really attached to the idea of being able to tag stuff with whatever dumb words or phrases I want. I do have the suspicion that it helps my memory work better when I see my own personalized tags, but I don't have hard data to support the suspicion. In general I'm all for organization and making things as easy to find as possible, but whenever anyone brings up the idea that users should be limited to picking from a predefined list of tags, I get ornery. I guess it seems like one of those pivot points where reducing choice might benefit all but takes the fun out of it. I'm pretty sure that better group organization will probably win out eventually over the fun and possibilities of tagging things as you like them. But I'm not completely resigned to that fact just yet.

One of the big x-factors in all of this is Google. EarthLink Product Manager Travis Metcalf, who tracks some of this stuff, has pointed out that very few of Google's applications support tagging as part of their organizational structure. You can bet that's not any sort of oversight. There's been some speculation around here that Google is working on their own answer to the tagging problem, which may look a lot like the other stuff we've seen, or it could be some completely new way to categorize personal information. But if their stated goal is to classify the world's data, this is a really juicy problem for them to solve.

If the great internet minds inside and outside of Google find that some structure is needed to make tagging as useful as possible, I'm hoping they arrive at some hybrid model that lets me use my own choice of tags in addition to the pre-defined list.