More State of the Blogosphere

Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of blog search firm Technorati continues his State of Blogosphere report.  Part 1 covered Blog Growth, Part 2 covered Posting Volume and Part 3, posted yesterday, covers Tags & Tagging.   I am most interested in the Tags & Tagging coverage; I wanted to see if Dave had (or anyone else) some thoughts as to where this is all going.  But Dave said, "Of course, because the act of tagging is such a new thing, making predictions on where it will go in the future is anyone's guess. I believe that as long as the tagging system is set up to encourage accountability (e.g. link-based tags that are inside of a blog post) and discourage gaming, the folksonomy created will continue to provide useful in helping even non-bloggers to help view a more organized world."

The fact is that unfortunately, for business research, searching for tags doesn't work.  It's a combination of two factors - the blog search engines are covering too much and there isn't any consistency in business-specific tags.  I'll post some examples next week.

Comments

[P-Air]

Steve, perhaps it's not so much that tags don't work for business research as much as how can one leverage the tagging infrastructure w/structured tags.

Imagine taking a taxonomy like GICS or Revere's, and creating what I'll call for lack of a better term "branded tags", for each node in their hierarchy (or at least for all of the end nodes). You could then use automated categorization technologies to index content into a del.icio.us or Technorati-like repository that contained business tagged content. This would lead to being able to request items tagged: "revere-semiconductors" or "GICS-Diversified-Chemicals", and you'd know that the results had greater consistency because they were tagged by an automated system following institutionally established rules (those of Revere or S&P/Morgan Stanley). This as opposed to some random tagging function by individuals.

All this to say, that you could leverage what's being created and the nice RSS tools that are leveraging access and enabling the manipulation of this content, for more serious business purposes, rather than for the serendipitous content relationships that tags are being used for today.

Just a thought...