Tag - you're it

Tagging, labelling, classifying surely something librarians should be good at although as Shirky's article Ontology is overated makes clear, we are used to structured categories and classmark arrangements and web 2.0 is based on people just making their own choices.  One of the reasons this works with online material is the keyword searching.   You type in anything and up pop your results.  If you had to plough manually through indexes filled with all the words that people had used to describe the same thing it would be as big as a dictionary - bigger even with different spellings.

Of course with free text tagging it does mean that you may miss alot of stuff that you would be interested in but probably balanced out by what you find extra.  Of course adding user tags to our catalogues would be useful - not many of my users would put "theater - Rome" when searching for Roman theatres (good excuse to add holiday photo of theatre/theater in Orange!).

Although I tried an advance search of Google blogs to see if I could just search for labels but I didn't see an option.  That would have been interesting - anyone know if there is a way?  Also went on a few blogs and found that many people don't label at all.

Just realised another problem with labelling - I went to add "Orange" as a tag for my picture of the theatre and realise how disappointed fruit lovers would be!