I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have been experimenting for a while now with tagging my posts using Technorati tags. I’ve settled on using Flock as my preferred blogging platform, at least in part because of the ease with which I can associate tags and categories with each post. (By the way, I also love the way that I can use Flock to access my Flickr account and associate tags with my photos and/or quickly insert them into blog postings.) I’ve mentioned in the past that I am somewhat dubious about tagging, but I also can see some of its benefits from the user perspective. The jury is still out. In the meantime, I have some tagging questions that are nagging me. Maybe I am simply exhibiting the anal retentive stereotype of someone with a library cataloging background, who knows?!

1. Does it matter that there is frequent divergence in how others are tagging the same concept or entity? I’m not even talking about using different (more specific or more general) words. Even when we use the same terms, we can input them in different ways. To illustrate, here is one recent example I’ve come across: “library 2.0″ (what I’ve used) vs. “library2.0″ (notice that lack of a space in between “library” and “2.0″). Then there is the use of capitalization or lack thereof. E.g. “Library 2.0″ vs. “library 2.0″. I don’t view this as mattering that much, but it may matter in certain situations.
2. I love the concept of developing a tag cloud, and am intrigued by the work of some to tie this into the library online catalog. See, e.g., the work being done at the University Libraries at George Mason University using subject headings extracted from a Voyager system. This is just one example; there are many others. What I am not clear on, though, is whether this is really the answer or solution to the inherent disparity in tags used by different people. Does this disparity not really matter? Of course, there has always been disparity in library cataloging, even when using subject thesauri like LCSH.
3. It seems that different services develop their own sets of tags. E.g. there are Technorati tags, del.icio.us tags, Flickr tags, and even LibraryThing tags. It seems logical to think about über tags, that allow the user to map between disparate systems. Is that (or would that be) beneficial? A sort of Dublin Core for the tagging world? Is anyone developing something like this or even thinking about it, or am I way off?

There are other niggly things that I can’t think of right now, but if I can remember them later, I’ll jot them down and ask about them in a separate post.