Five Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again
Tagging content online is something that doesn't seem to have taken off the way some people expected it to. — Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer?
Context & Ripple Effects
Tagging has been on the tutorial circuit for over two years: A VC folded tagging into the posting-subscribing-search loop back in October 2005, and mid-2007 brought a wave of practitioner explainers — MyBlogLog's All About Tags and Search Engine Land's illustrated tagging primer.
Closing out 2007, ReadWriteWeb's verdict is that the practice has not matched expectations, framing the open question as whether tags are too complicated for mainstream users or too arbitrary to deliver the precision formal taxonomies offer.
First-order effects
- Platforms that built discovery around user-assigned tags — the ones MyBlogLog and Search Engine Land spent 2007 teaching — get weak coverage when most users decline to tag, forcing product teams toward editor- or system-assigned metadata.
- ReadWriteWeb treats tagging adoption itself as an unresolved design question rather than settled best practice, shifting its own coverage from how-to instruction to critique.
Second-order effects
- Search and aggregation services that leaned on tag clouds lose a cheap relevance signal, raising the value of structured metadata they control directly instead of crowdsourcing.
- If arbitrariness is the core complaint, vendors gain an opening to sell controlled vocabularies and semi-formal classification schemes to sites that tried folksonomy first.
Third-order effects
- The folksonomy-versus-taxonomy debate points toward platform-managed classification: if voluntary tagging stalls, metadata authority migrates from individual users to the services hosting the content.
- How that migration plays out determines whether open, cross-site tag vocabularies survive as a shared web layer or fragment into proprietary taxonomies inside each platform.
The trend: User-generated metadata is drifting from free-form folksonomy toward structured, platform-controlled classification as voluntary tagging fails to scale.