Yahoo's game of photo tag

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elusive goal. That could explain why tapping Web users' desire to create addictive services or communities is an attractive solution.

The free tagging philosophy is, "Look, I'm not going to force everybody to use the same tags, and this way the system can grow larger and richer and exhibit emergent phenomenon that its creators didn't think about," said R.V. Guha, co-creator of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and founder of Epinions.

In a sense, Yahoo is returning to its roots with Flickr. In 1995, Yahoo's co-founders started the site as a way to keep track of their favorite Web pages, and eventually built a massive hierarchical Web directory. Only in the last couple of years has Yahoo put its directory on the backburner in favor of pure search technology. With Flickr, the company is investing in technology that lets people build personalized directories.

Yahoo itself said that digital photography was secondary to its decision to buy Flickr. More important is Flickr's technology and smart founding team, said Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens.

"Any time you navigate a sea of data, you're going to need something better than search. You need many more dimensions to navigate the data."

--Joshua Schachter, founder, Del.icio.us

"Flickr's strengths are complimentary to Yahoo's goals for creating next-generation services," Stevens said.

Much of Web search originated with directories. The Open Directory, for example, started in the mid-1990s as an open-source project that enlisted volunteers to act as editors, controlling the categorization and hierarchy of new Web pages. But as the project grew, it became unwieldy to force everyone to tag the same way.

Netscape and Excite were among the companies that explored free tagging in the early Internet days. Browser and application makers tested services that let people annotate Web sites and store them to one central location, for example. But nothing caught on because the experiments lacked a critical mass, said Guha, currently a researcher at IBM's Almaden labs.

"Now you have enough people on the Web, and who are in tune to a Web lifestyle, so you can get critical mass to these kind of things," Guha said.

In contrast to the open-source altruism of the Open Directory, Flickr and Web bookmarks manager Del.icio.us have appealed to people's selfish side. With Del.icio.us, people tag Web pages to create their own personalized record so that they can return to them later. People are encouraged to tag files properly so that they can keep their files organized.

"Any time you navigate a sea of data, you're going to need something better than search. You need many more dimensions to navigate the data," said Joshua Schachter, founder of Del.icio.us.

"The tags provide more traction to navigate the world," he added.

Del.icio.us lets people bookmark Web pages they visit and organize them into groups so they can find them later. The site also uses

Hierarchical tagging system at Consumerpedia.org

Consumerpedia has a unique hierarchical tagging system. More information on this is available in the About and Help sections at www.consumerpedia.org

<a href="http://www.consumerpedia.org>www.consumerpedia.org

[jamie.p.walsh]

As long as it takes longer to "tag" then to "create" the data....

what is the point. volumes of wiki style search results, which, while they are interesting, are hardly accurate all the time.

Also, it would only be a matter of time before "tag mobs" start hacking and skewing the search results.

Tag Searching

Even though one of the advantages of tagging is that it is "anti-search," there are so many different tags in so many different services that one may actually need a search engine to find the right tags. I saw one at http://www.tagboo.com.