Feedster 'Tag This', and Vague Predictions Regarding the Future of Tagging

"Over the weekend Feedster announced that they have joined the tagging revolution. They're coming at it from a different angle than Technorati Tags, though: Technorati harvests author tags from blog content, while Feedster's new "Tag This" UI widget allows anonymous reader tagging. While Technorati is now tracking how authors tag their content, Feedster is more interested in what the readers say. Feedster-feeder Scott Rafer invokes Dan Gillmor on this topic: the readers know more than the author.

They're defending the tagging interface from (so far mostly imaginary) tagspamming bots with a Captcha, which adds enough of a delay to discourage the process. If that kind of thing is going to be required for each tagging operation, I personally won't be able to tolerate that "decypher this weird shit" step. Tagging with Delicious-backed tools (I'll plug Scrumptious here) is easy because we got that mutual trust thing out of the way up front, and it doesn't get in the way on every operation. Feedster could authenticate all the tagging operations and still publish the resulting tags anonymously, like Gordon Luk's Freetag module as used at Upcoming.org. That way the owner of the tag database has some recourse against abusive users, but the tagging is still private." (Via the institute of hybernautics)