A few months ago I compiled a couple of presentations plus some material from my book into an article on emerging trends in tagging for the ASIST Bulletin's special issue on information architecture. They published it a few weeks ago, so I thought I'd share it with you here (also in printable PDF form).

The main point of the article is that there's a lot more to tagging than what you see on Del.icio.us and Flickr.

By 2007 a number of people noticed that tagging seemed to be stuck.... Just as this conversation was happening, I was in the middle of writing a book on tagging. I had made a point of reviewing the academic research as well as taking a detailed look at the tagging systems being built by entrepreneurs, Web 2.0 startups and established software companies.

And what I found could hardly be called stale.

There had been significant innovation in tagging over the past few years. But it wasn't happening at Flickr or Del.icio.us – their tagging systems hadn’t changed much since 2005.

Still, because they were so popular and because their data was used for much of the academic research on tagging, Flickr and Del.icio.us had come to represent all tagging systems. And while they're still excellent examples of large-scale popular tagging systems, they're no longer the beau ideal when it comes to tagging.

The article mentions some of my favorite tagging systems, like LibraryThing and ZigTag, and how they're reinventing user-generated metadata. My recent presentations cover a lot of similar material, so it's also a good companion to my slides.

Posted in Announcements on September 9, 2008

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