Matt Mower:
I have been surprised, disappointed, and excited that, despite the
widespread adoption of tagging across many applications, the state of
the art in tagging seems firmly wedged in 2003.
When Matt and I went to the first BlogTalk in Vienna and presented a first version of K-Collector, where users could add topics to their blog posts,
David Weinberger liked it but told us that he believed that most users were not going to tag their own contents. Inspired by his advice, we went back to the drawing board and came up with some tools to simplify the process of choosing and managing tags (which, back then, we were calling "topics").
We even started an effort to bring these tools to other blogging platforms (we had it for Radio and Movable Type), but we ended up running out of steam, nobody returned our calls, we got very little support and at the end we gave up. No big deal, we were too small, too early and probably not smart enough.
But when Technorati introduced tags I did
thought "well, THIS time THEY will successfully introduce a new generation of tools", finally everybody will experience tagging for the rest of us.
But they didn't. And nobody else did. As of today the best tool to add tags to what I write is still K-Collector, which reads my posts, compare them to a list of tags created by me and my colleagues and comes up with a bunch of suggestions that quite often are very useful. Unfortunately it only works on our internal blogging system and I have no intention to do much with it.
4 years later I'm still wondering when will we get some truly advanced tagging tools. Where are all these tools to manage all my tags (on Flickr, on del.icio.us, on technorati, in my RSS reader, on my blog, etc), to help me organizing them, to allow me to gain more advantages from tagging?
(maybe they are somewhere and I simply have not found them yet...)
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