Steve Rubel gets it. He's telling folks to watch Flckr tags for their products and such:

Using Flickr tags, you can assess just how much consumers are evangelizing brands by stacking them against their competitors. All you need to do is simply replace the bracketed text below with the the name of your product and enter the URL into your browser...

Don't forget about the other popular tag-based service: del.icio.us. The same logic (except for the 1000 words) applies there too.

We don't yet know how tagging will really scale beyond the ~40,000 users of del.icio.us or the ~150,000 users of Flickr. Clay touches on this in folksonomies + controlled vocabularies. But for now, they're a pretty good way to feel the pulse of the geek and early adopter crowds.

Posted by jzawodn at January 09, 2005 02:05 AM

Reader Comments
# Swaroop C H said:

Headshift has a nice blog post on the same:
'Can social tagging overcome barriers to content classification?'
http://www.headshift.com/archives/002085.cfm

More links:
'Ethnoclassification and vernacular vocabularies'
http://www.peterme.com/archives/000387.html

'WordPress, Tagging, and a Critique of Hierarchy'
http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002360.html

Suddenly, tagging seems to be the in-thing and for good reason. For example, GMail and Bloomba are two such examples of popular tag-based products.

on January 9, 2005 02:49 AM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Both Bloomba and GMail focus primarily on private content.

The two I noted are all about public (or shared) content. That's a really important difference.

on January 9, 2005 02:58 AM
# James Tauber said:

Some thoughts of mine at:

Translations, Glosses, Tags and Folksonomies

and

Tag the Tags

addressing some of the issues and ways of making tagging slightly richer.

See also

Delicious Trackbacks and Leonardo

where I talk about a middle ground between public content tagging and private content tagging with particular reference to my own blog software.

on January 9, 2005 05:32 AM
# Nick W said:

Does anyone know if there are any open source tag based projects out there yet? Im really looking for some software to mess with....

cheers

on January 9, 2005 08:41 AM
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