Tag mania sweeps the Web

When I first wrote about social tagging services last year, Flickr (for shared photos) and del.icio.us  (for shared bookmarks) were among a handful of tag-enriched applications. Nowadays you can’t turn around without tripping over a new one. Three newcomers are My Web 2.0, Rojo 2.0, and Swik.

Like del.icio.us and Furl, Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 invites users to save bookmarks to the Web and then apply tags that flexibly categorize them. Rojo, a Web-based RSS reader like Bloglines, does the same with RSS items. Swik, a new Wiki site launched by SourceLabs, invites the open source community to bookmark and tag resources related to open source projects.

Is this a fad or a real breakthrough in information management? I say both. Tagging has attained the elusive cachet of coolness. New taggers feel an initial thrill of empowerment. Venture capitalists, sensing the buzz, are looking to amplify it.

When the novelty wears off, though, I think that tagging will have altered the information landscape in a fundamental way. Here’s an example: I’m often asked a question that begins with “Do you have any pointers to … ?” The answer to such a question is a set of URLs. Two years ago, I would have collected those URLs and transmitted them in the body of an e-mail. Nowadays I’d collect them using del.icio.us tags and send only the del.icio.us URL.

The first thing to notice about this method is that I’ve “futureproofed” my answer. If I were to send you a list of four URLs in an e-mail today and you revisited that message next month, it would still only contain four URLs. If you revisited the del.icio.us URL next month, though, you’d find those four URLs plus any new ones I may have added to the collection.

Dynamically self-updating collections shift information management into a higher gear, but it’s the social dimension of tagging that really kicks things into overdrive. At InfoWorld, for example, we’ve been tagging the stories we publish. In a progress report on the experiment, I showed how it’s not only helping InfoWorld editors to work collaboratively toward a common vocabulary, but it’s also enlisting readers to enrich and refine that vocabulary.

There’s more. The set of InfoWorld items bookmarked and tagged by our editors leads, indirectly, to del.icio.us users who have bookmarked and tagged those same items. When I checked today, there were 5,644 of them. These are people whose interests, by definition, intersect with ours.

Of course, the twin enablers of this phenomenon — open sharing and large scale — don’t normally apply in the enterprise. How tagging will fare on intranets, where smaller groups are further subdivided into security zones, remains to be seen.

My guess is that e-mail will play an important role. Mining corporate e-mail to identify groups who are — or should be — collaborating is getting to be a big deal. Tagging can improve that process.

Because e-mail remains the dominant tool for ad hoc collaboration across corporate borders, I expect tags will help there, too. In Gmail, I “label” (in other words, tag) conversational threads for easy reference. If you and I are working on Project X and either of us has tagged a thread accordingly, shouldn’t we share the benefits of that tag — in any e-mail program? Soon, I hope, we will.