A taggable web, a taggable desktop, a taggable workspace
(which I use regularly), Technorati or flickr, using tags or keywords as lightweight metadata has become popular again. The nice thing about tagging is that it allows you to categorize data according to more than one criteria, opposed to strictly hierarchical organization schemes like folder hierarchies or taxonomies. What is new about tagging in Web 2.0 applications? First, there is the concept of folksonomies which helps uses finding the best tags based on tags assigned to an item by other users. But the most important improvements are new user interfaces that make tagging very easy by adding type-ahead suggestions, browser extensions and bookmarklets and tag clouds that make tagging an web item just a matter of klicking the bookmarklet, klicking some suggested tags and hitting return.
The exciting news is that tagging is slowly moving from the web to the desktop. Desktop innovation happens at slower pace than web innovation, mostly due to the fact that there are much longer release cycles, but some applications like leaftag for the Gnome desktop (screenshots, video), the Quicksilver tagging module for Mac OS X (described by Livehacker as 'Metadata as a filing system') and some interesting fake screenshots of a tagging feature for Mac OS X Leopard, which look very good show the direction of development. All modern filesystems support metadata as file attributes. It is now up to the desktop developers to implement tagging interfaces for this new kind of lightweight metadata.
If we take a look ahead we will see in some years metadata-enabled desktops, metadata-enabled websites and tagging an accepted orgainizational principle. What we should be looking for is a metadat-enabled workspace environment that takes up the opportunities of tagging and lightweight metadata and support sharing of this metadata to be able to organize the data of collaborative workspaces, knowledgespaces, taskspaces and conversationspaces. An example of a tagging-centric organization of conversationspaces is vennt, an online forum software I discussed before.
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I am Product Manager for Collaboration and Digital Asset Management at