“If tags are “messy” that’s only true on the system-side, not on the user side. “myhometown” is perfectly meaningful, possibly more meaningful to me than any other tag the system knows about. And if it happens to overlap with someone else’s use of that term? Not my problem!”

Exactly right!

Clearly I implied the same point you are making? Still- perhaps you didn’t see my second post where I explicitly stated your point:

so having a suggested response should in no way interfere with how the user is thinking, and should not be an forced step in the tagging process.

anyway, back on point:

But I bet it would be a net loss to suggest (or require) tags from some existing set.

Depends on the context. For tags that have meaning to you (again, personal value precedes network value) this is probably true. But, as I discussed(my own site) there are certainly cases where others need to use your tags.. like posting and searching for jobs by country “tags.” In this case, it’s not a net loss to suggest something like “the community has decided to use “USA” for “United States of America…” and it’d be in your best interest (net gain) to follow suit, or else you’ll get frustrated job seekers and potentially less applicants.

How about a resturant review site and you tag your review as “mexicen” on accident? Who’s going to see your review then? Of course, you’d always be able to still choose that value with the same level of effort, just like google, if that’s what you really wanted.

But that’s forcing the users to conform, even if it’s a fairly easy process. Better still would be to have smarter search feature. So… if I click on “mexican” to find my reviews.. it gets all “mexican” tagged items, and then suggests the other ones…”We also found a ‘mexicen’ tag… will that work?”

…but of course, as we enterain that line of thinking out further, it eventually leads to tagging of tags Hello square one!

How would you prevent tags like we see on Consumating.com. For example, check out the “What others tagged” section of this person’s profile. What’s the purpose of the “Show Me Your PHP” or the “COV Rocks” tags?

Auto-suggest is one thing, and del.icio.us uses it nicely to suggest tags I’ve already created. But I bet it would be a net loss to suggest (or require) tags from some existing set.

Joshua says “The concern with tags like these is that meaning is lost when people tag this way.” It seems like from the user’s point of view, meaning is always *created* when they tag that way.

If tags are “messy” that’s only true on the system-side, not on the user side. “myhometown” is perfectly meaningful, possibly more meaningful to me than any other tag the system knows about. And if it happens to overlap with someone else’s use of that term? Not my problem!

By intercepting the creation of a new tag and spell checking (possibly requiring a valid word) and possibly offering a way to integrate a novel tag with the thesaurus, organizations could keep the flexibility while providing an opportunity for people other than the tagger to make use of that tag.

Additionally, as new tools for automatic categorization including mechanical (eg Bayesian Filtering) or social (eg Google like algorithms) become more widely used with tags, their usefulness will increase.

Of course that might be considered bad by people who use private tagging.

This way, the user is not taken out of the flow of their task (and more importantly, personal value) ..but still has easy access to the “social network norms”

For example, as you type “New York”.. you could get a “Did you mean “NYC?” back from the app….or “other people have used ‘NYC’…”

In other words, let the user think about the tag in their own terms, but show them the value of the “social” tag. Allow them to choose from there.