Tim Bray: Are tags useful? Are there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you want to do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly work better than old-fashioned search? I really want to believe that tagging is big, a game-changer, but the longer I go on asking this question and not getting an answer, the more nervous I get.
Randy: I have reasons, that are obvious to my friends, to subscribe to the Flickr hummingbird tag. I'm certain that PR people at XYZ Corp would benefit tremendous by subscribing to the XYZ tag. It's an easy way of tracking stuff. Or maybe I want ideas around a word, like Juice. Could this not all be done with URIs and URNs? I doubt it, because there is an element of small world in tags that is not captured by URIs and URNs. What do I mean by that? Well, not every picture with the same tag are actually related. This allows information to flow across community boundaries. And as we know, that's where all the interesting stuff lies.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of Technorati tag URIs. I much prefer simple RSS 2.0 categories.
