The Year in Tags

This was a big year for tags. You could even say that tags went mainstream in 2005 (if tags were a band, they'd be The Killers). So, given we're at the end of 2005, I thought I would take a look back at the major announcements and events in the world of ad hoc, user-created metadata.

These are the events I thought were important (feel free to add your own in the comments):

Technorati introduces tags (January). Technorati's tags was the first implementation of distributed tagging (i.e. T'rati doesn't own the tags the way Flickr does--it picks them up from blog posts while it's crawling). It's been criticized, but it's widely used.

Folksonomies at the IA Summit (March). Tagging was one of the hot topics at the Information Architecture Summit in Montreal, and we kicked off the discussion with a pretty good panel (full disclosure: I moderated the panel).

Ontology is Overrated (March). Clay Shirky's provocative talk at Etech predicted that the rise of tagging meant the death of hierarchy. Or something like that. A bit too dogmatic for me, but it was received like a papal bull and produced some interesting critiques and counter-critiques. (To give credit where it's due, this blog wouldn't exist but for Clay's presentation.)

Yahoo buys Flickr (March). The first big acquisition of what some people call the "Web 2.0 era" (I call it "Ned").

Yahoo launches My Web 2.0 (June). Yahoo integrated search, social networks and tags in its My Web 2.0 product. Some people noted the product's lacklustre growth, which perhaps set the stage for another socsoft/web 2.0 acquisition by Yahoo at the end year.

Flickr adds interestingness and clustering (August). This was a big one for me--it proved that with some algorithmic mojo tags could act more like categories, separating like things from unlike things, wholes from parts and so on. It can even tell dog noses from cat noses.

Hurricane Katrina (September). Tags not only helped keep people connected during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, they tethered together many disparate pieces of content so we could make sense of complex, evolving, intertwingled events. (Or try to make sense of them, anyway.)

Google adds tagging. Kind of. (October) As part of its search history feature, Google allows tagging of pages. The tags are private, and the feature seems peripheral. To paraphrase Elvis Mitchell, this one would have to work a lot harder to earn the appellation uninspired.

Amazon launches tags (November). Amazon now lets you tag books. I wasn't all that impressed with their implementation--their product pages seem cluttered--but Amazon has always been smart about social IA and user-created content. It'll be interesting to see how they leverage their tag data. (SIPs are cool, too.)

Everyone must have tags! (November) Anil Dash points out that tags--like Ajax and Ruby on Rails--are becoming web 2.0 cliches.

Google Base launches with tagging. Kind of. (November) Google uses the term labels, but we know them as tags. Search Engine Watch didn't think much of Google Base's tagging, but it's just one of several kinds of classification used on that product. Key takeaway: Tagging is a means, not an end.

Tag formats: Can't we all just get along? (December) Matt from 37 signals points out the multiple variations of tagging UIs. The big question: "Will all these different formats still be around a year from now or will a standard emerge?"

Yahoo buys del.icio.us (December). The rumoured price was around $30 million, which has Yahoo spending about $100 for each of the 300,000 or so del.icio.us users. The interesting question is how does tagging behaviour figure into the price? I think (and this is purely speculation) Yahoo paid for millions of tagged URLs plus a community of active taggers, both of which promise to boost the relevance of search results.

Folksonomy makes the NY Times Magazine "Year in Ideas" list (Decemember). Despite its humble origins and many doubters (I'm looking at you Morville), folksonomy is named one of 2005's best ideas by the New York Times Magazine.

Back in April, Tim Bray asked some important questions:

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.

2005 has proven that tags are both big (in the financial sense) and useful. Whether or not tagging is a game-changer will, I think, depend on what Yahoo, Amazon and Google do with tags in 2006. But with three big players in the tagging game there's a lot of opporunity for innovation.