It is the muse of every well known blogger and it has driven the semantic world into a frenzy. People have already started worshipping it as the next big evolution. Even Technorati has done it. Tags have become the new holy grail of the long tail worshippers.

I am quite ok with it. No “OOOOOO” or “hail thy master” stuff. Tagging is something that was meant to happen, sooner or later. If you notice carefully, people had started tagging long before they realised it. The pictures you upload to your website or the names you give to your documents. In the picture example, each picture has a name (a “tag”) and most often than not these tags are abstract (“meeting.jpg” or “ugly.jpg”). And when you use the Search Engine to trawl and extract images matching certain words (“tags” again) the power of those “tags” just become obvious.

For example, I was browsing the image search results from google that match “manage”. And I found several picturisque interpretations of that word, right from the most obvious (“manager overlooking subordinates”) to the very creative (“caring for the environment”). It then just hit me, how you can, without moving an inch, use the collective thinking of the whole world with tags. Every tag shows how distinct human interpretations are and in that distinction lies the creativity of every human being. And without lifting a finger I can use the untapped creativity of people. I realised how “manage” can symbolise “caring”. Perhaps, I could use a picture of “caring” to prevent the negative connatations of the word “manage” if the need arose.

Flickr does a much better job I hear. But the fact remains that “tags” were in existence long before we realised they were. And new tagging applications have potential to create a universal repository of human interpretations that was till now unimaginable.