Tags do work (for me, at least)

For the "too long; didn't read" crowd: I've been using a lot of tags on Delicious over a relatively long time, so they seem very useful to me. Delicious encourages the use of tags through UI convention and tool usage patterns, whereas Flickr presents no particular bias toward collecting tags from users. Since title and description attract more contribution effort from users on Flickr than on Delicious, it's natural that search over those fields will be more productive than for tags. Search on Delicious doesn't have access to the complete text of the bookmarked resource, and often tags will contain information missing from the supplied title or description. All told, tags on Delicious are more essential than tags on Flickr. In conclusion, I think Do Tags Work? misses the value of tags, as I know them, by focusing on Flickr. Of course, I don't really care what this means for folksonomy and the rest of Web 2.0—tags work for me on Delicious. So, I suspect this means I'm not entirely opposed to the sentiment in Do Tags Work?, because I don't think tags work everywhere their use is attempted. The rest of this entry elaborates on the above. [ ... 3328 words ... ]