Yahoo's game of photo tag

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language associations to recommend the bookmarked Web pages of other users. "It's not about search, it's about discovery and serendipity," Schachter said.

Tapping into group intelligence to create and administer tags could open the door to unknown and surprising applications. If anyone can add their own personal tags to anything, and enough people participate, whole new models for finding and consuming information might emerge. For example, RSS readers that today sort articles by publisher in the future might sort articles by thousands of specific topic areas chosen by readers.

While more traditional efforts to categorize articles are already under way on sites like Topix and Moreover, free tagging could spawn spontaneous categories that no individual might hit on alone. That promises to be more responsive to how people actually look for information, and keep up with changing trends faster, among other things.

"The big question is, are any of these technologies that are capable of improving search, capable of creating the network effect?"

--R.V. Guha, founder, Epinions

One potential flaw is spam. If people seek to misuse tags for personal gain, for example, by labeling files in misleading ways, the system could collapse. On the other hand, there is hope that the system could be self-healing, given that a single tagger or even a small group won't be able to override the will of the majority over the long haul.

Another challenge these communities face is what's called normalizing a taxonomy, or creating consistencies between the language people use to describe their files.

Peter Merholz, a founder at Adaptive Path, a user-experience company, said the happy byproduct of Flickr and other "folksonomies" is that there's this global categorization of information.

"Flickr is valuable because its creators understood the opportunities on the Web in connecting people. It's the same way eBay is all about leveraging the power of the network," Merholz said.

Future applications for free tagging could include news, blogs, Web and enterprise search.

"The future of folksnomies involves meshing these user-generated categorizations with more standardized categorizations, such as the Library of Congress or the Getty Thesaurus of place names, so you could start to connect data to allow more of these associations to be made," Merholz said.

Free tagging could help Web search in a couple of ways. If Yahoo or Google could enlist people to annotate visited Web pages or those which crop up in search results, it could be a valuable voter's guide for them to deliver better results next time.

A key byproduct of free tagging for search would be a visitor loyalty coveted by all the providers. As many researchers point out, the cost to switch search engines is nothing, compared with instant messaging technologies, e-mail, or applications that carry what's called "the network effect." That's why all of the search players are introducing new downloadable tools for PC search.

"The big question is, are any of these technologies that are capable of improving search capable of creating the network effect? If so, then people can't switch out of it," Guha said.

"The key question is," Guha said, "Can Flickr give Yahoo Search the network effect?"

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.