CNN.com has an interesting and surprisingly well-written story about how tagging is making headway in improving the usability of computers.
In case tagging is new to you, it's essentially labeling things -- files, documents, photos, movies, etc. -- with one or more keywords or phrases so that you can find similar things more easily later. Searching for text documents based on their contents is easy, but searching for movies or photos based on their contents isn't. Tagging hopes to change that. Extending tagging to communities of users has interesting implications, but the threats to tagging's widespread adoption pointed out by the article are significant:
Engineers recognize the shortcomings and are working on better tools.Search for "automobiles" of Flickr, and you're given "cars," "car" and "porsche" as related options. Enough people tag photos both "automobiles" and "cars" that clustering software can tell they are related.
Another drawback lacks an easy solution, though. Once tagging takes off, marketers are bound to add irrelevant tags to hijack you to the latest Viagra ad.
Warns Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter Search Engine Watch: "The noise and deliberate manipulation will probably just bring the system into a crashing halt."
