Beyond Laser Tag and Telephone Tag

2005 will be the year of tagging (That's the kind of visionary statements people expect at this time of the year so there you go).

On a more serious note, I feel that tags (user's keywords associated with content) have a potential to achieve some convergence in information classification and retrieval.

I wonder . . . if more and more services in 2005 add user-generated tagging, will "federated tagging" be far behind? And if someone were to index all the tags from these various sites.... would the result be Taggle? Imagine: a service where you type in a keyword, and you get back all the hits that have that word as a tag. If Flickr, del.icio.us, and umpteen other sites cooperated, then an uber-tag-search service might just work . .
Ref: Brian Storms: Taggle

This is a great idea because it is very simple and very powerful at the same time.
Once users get in the habit of applying tags to content relevant to them (and they do) they start planting hooks that enable them (and others if they choose to —like on del.icio.us) to manipulate information across the boundaries of format:

• Most bloggers already use categories to classify post on their blogs and these can evolve very easily into open taxonomies.
• del.icio.us bookmarks are already organised with tags. So are Flickr posts. Many more will follow soon.
• Besides web content, files can carry tags —mp3s already do, any file on a Microsoft's file system can have keywords associated with it (right click on any file and go to "Summary" tab), standard emails have an optional (largerly unused) "keywords" field in their header.

So beyond the idea of a Taggle application, tags have the potential to federate web and desktop information management in a revolutionary way. Maybe we'll see soon the emergence of a new class of application that help collect, filter and organise under tags all information relevant to a user. I am dreaming already of being able to click on VoIP for example and find grouped underneath the day's news on that topic, the posts from the most valued VoIP bloggers, the latest update of my favourite software SIP client, new bug reports on my company's intranet bug tracking system, new customer requests in my mailbox, etc.

These are early days - Delicious only started in mid November '04 !! I expect to see flat tags used in many applications in the year ahead, with some very surprising results.
Ref: Knowledge-at-work: Social bookmarking - more than meets the eye