Debate about tagging

Is Tagging A Disruptive Innovation? - Joel Lamantia asks that question at Tagsonomy.com (July 21, 2007. The spread of tagging could distract from creating or maintaining taxonomies and possibly in use of metadata. But there could also be a large element of hype in the attention tagging is getting. This is one piece of a longer discussion. Lamnatia concludes "Though it’s been a few years since tagging became visible, it seems too early to understand what kind of changes - if any - will occur in the metadata management ecosystem as a result of tagging’s emergence."

One wonders if people really want to spend the extra few seconds to tag an item, and if they do tag to use something more useful than "read later". I suspect that tagging will remain personal, and that general access will depend on automatic categorization based on business rules.