Tagging jumps the shark

Tagging (a la del.icio.us / flickr / technorati) is a clever newish technique for empowering users to organize digital content. But alas, in the world of blogging, and in the world of the west-coast tech elite, nothing is ever just a useful, good innovation. It’s always the “new new thing”, the game-changing paradigm that will eliminate all that comes before it.

Tagging jumped the shark with Clay Shirkeys overheated “ontologies are overrated” speech at ETech 2005, and since then a host of articles challenging the idea of tags as information nirvana have emerged like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Below are some choice excerpts from the backlash.

Tbray writes: Someone needs to do a little basic research. First (this is the hard part) you pull together a set of sample searches. Then, you go and do each search twice, once using keywords and once using tags. Then you record which way worked better. (Via Jonathan Boutelle)