imran*

Back in January 2005, as Flickr and del.icio.us drove the adoption of tags, Brian Dear speculated (as did I) on the emergence of federated tagging; a Google for your tags – Taggle.

Now, eighteen months later tags are everywhere – Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, 43 Things, Gmail, Vox, YouTube, Ning, Last.FM and our very own Simpatico, Klippr and Comcentrix. Tags have become an essential piece of Web 2.0 infrastructure, providing the defacto mechanism for organising and navigating information.

Yet, no metaservices have arisen to enable users to pivot through their increasingly dense cloud of tagged messages, photos, songs, post and videos. Most of the services listed above make a user’s tags available through API access, but no one has joined up the dots – the tagsonomy/folksonomy/tagosphere remains fragmented.

What I’d like to see…

• Use of tag microformats in sites that support tagging – would that be rel-tag, xFolk or hReview?
• A service that aggregated my tags and everyone’s tags – from known tag-based apps and items with microformatted content
• A great Stamen-powered visualisation+UI, that lets me glance, pivot, find, search and scan; through people, time, places, spaces and things.

C’mon – let’s taggle this problem!