Thomas Vander Wal, who coined the term folksonomy and is founder and senior consultant for InfoCloud Solutions, says he thinks that in the next couple of years, companies will adopt tagging widely. "Having a folksonomy means you can use people to fill in the gaps in a taxonomy and track emergent vocabularies," he notes.

Tagging for Dollars

Such flexibility is what is likely to make tagging useful to companies, says David Weinberger, a research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "It’s so easy, so cheap, and the benefits are immediate," he says.

Tagging is already spreading quickly through the Web. The initial ideas are fairly old—the Bitzi online tagging tool (www.bitzi.com) has been around since the year 2000—but tagging as a phenomenon didn’t start until mid-2004, with the rise of sites such as Flickr, where users upload and tag photographs, and Del.icio.us, where people tag webpages. (Both Del.icio.us and Flickr were acquired by Yahoo in 2005.) Such sites have already shown that tags can be effective even if only small percentages of users adopt them. In fact, Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr and now director of technology development at Yahoo, says that a typical group probably needs fewer than 15 percent of its members tagging something for the tags to be useful in helping all members find things, and that number could be as low as 1 percent or 2 percent, depending on the size of the group.

Mis-Tagged

Despite the amount of hype surrounding tagging, it pays to remember that it is still in its very early stages. "We’re in the voyeurism phase here," says Greg Blonder, a venture capitalist at Morgenthaler Ventures. And he doesn’t believe all the early tagging leaders will stick around (he tags things like Flickr and Del.icio.us as "fads").

But Blonder does think tagging is useful. Morgenthaler has even invested in a company called Digital Railroad, which takes advantage of already-defined tags used in commercial photography to help photographers sell their images.

Tagging is also young enough that serious disagreements still exist within the tagging community about something so basic as how to use it. For instance, should museums let people tag a painting "beagle" if it in fact depicts a dalmatian?

On a more practical level, "Tags really don’t fit well with the way corporations tend to organize information," notes Jaquith. "Organizations like file folders, nested hierarchies and those ways of classifying things." But, he says, few companies do a good job of organizing information in this way, and some may find tags offer a more commonsense approach.