Towards a Universal Tagging Standards
I recently wrote (Folksonomic Discovery) about the importance of folksonomy and the dawning era of tagging for the people. But the problem with tagging is that it is balkanized. Flickr, 43 Things, and del.ico.us tags don't speak.
A universal tagging standard (or protocol) would solve this problem. Flickr, 43 Things and all the other tags would be the same kind of animals, and tagging application written on top of this animal kingdom could provide the visualization, correlation, linking, and other services that are needed.
The catch, of course, is that for a standard to be useful it has to be widely adapted. This is a crticial mass issue. With enough vendors implementing tagging using a given standard, pressure can be brought on everyone else to implement their tags in the same way - and to tag in the first place.
But different competing tagging standards might make it hard to write services across the the entire universe of tags.
Spaceman, at del.irio.us, points out to me that de.lirio.us uses tags that follow the xFolk format for tagging. Here's an example of XFolk as it can be used.
Posted by Harold Davis at June 19, 2005 10:32 PM
