The second panel I attend was entitled Tagging 2.0. This was one of major interest for me since one of the cornerstones of the Pegasus News plan involves vigorous tagging of local content to enable effortless customization of everyone's pages.

You know that the topic is one ripe for obfuscation when there is debate on what a "tag" is. Most people think of tagging as a way for individuals to mark content by topic so that they and others can find it easily, both as a means of archival and discovery. We're already using tags here at an elementary level: The photos that are on the right rail of this page are fed in because someone posted them on Flickr, and tagged them "texasgigs."

Most people think of tagging as a bottom-up endeavor, as opposed to a top-down, like we're going to do (at the start). We have a (buzzword alert) heirarchical taxonomy of metags to categorize local content. Most systems, like delicious, or Flickr depend on user-generated tags.

Even from tagging proponents, like Thomas Vander Wal (who coined the term "folksonomy") there was a clear sense that tagging is, at best, at the "1.0" stage. With a lot of diagrams, he basically pointed out that the individual element was missing from tags. Folks who tag something "Appleseed," looking for the Japanimation film, don't have much way to filter out Johnny Appleseed pictures and, well, apple sperm.

Prentiss Riddle, of Shadows, did a lot to validate my general folksonomical skepticisms. His list of the dirty secrets of tags:

• Ordinary people don't use 'em.



• Useful tagging involves a really carefully planned user interface



• There is little interoperability of tagging systems



• No one "delimits" the same. (See above item). Periods? commas? spaces?



• Ambiguity prevails -- Some tag "cat." Others "cats." Right now at one of the geekiest geek conferences out there, a bunch of techie tag snobs can't agree on whether to tag sxsw, sxswi, sxsw06, sxsw2006, etc.



• To do anything really cool, you need really good metadata -- which is hard when things are decentralized



• No one wants "pure" tags-- that's anarchy and useless. Nodding towards Steven Colbert: We want "tagginess"

All in all, this made me feel good about what we're engineering for the Pegasus launch. We're going to ensure consistency and utility with tags we created. Then, MAYBE, if we can find a way to do it without screwing it up, we'll enable the community to add tags that we've missed or cross-reference in ways we haven't thought of.

But that's when we really get to "Tagging 2.0."