Ian that sounds very interesting – like a totally new kind of analytics, I suppose.

Jack

@Jack, cross-platform tagging is sort of a way to go. My guess is that tagging will be mature when the stuff you tag on the web can be carried around with you and integrated into your desktop/phone search. In any case there is a value for publishers if they can pull back from these tagging pools the meta-data about that they have that have been tagged in these repositories. Connotea, the site I run, allows you to do this through our API calls and some people are already building on top of this, but mainly in the scientific field, not so much in the mainstream publishing field. It’s small scale now, but it’s there and it works.

- Ian

I think cross-platform tagging will still be the main route in for individual users, although I don’t think del.icio.us will necessarily persist as we know it today – everything evolves, right? I think, though, that publishers will/must begin to tag their own content more richly so that web services can pick it up and play with it – e.g. using Microformats in our online content that will have native support in Firefox 3. I think it’s easy to see how we can tag our science, technical and non-fiction content more, but what do we do with fiction? Tagging names, places, dates is a good start. We (users & publishers alike) could tag all the instances of “Poirot” and see how far the character penetrates fiction culture, for example – talk about intertextuality! Or if you like reading stories about Paris in the 1920s with references to the Left Bank and cabaret, then pull those tags together and you have reading/recommendation list.

James

Do you think user tagging will take off for publishers? Won’t users get tired of having to tag at every site they visit, and just use cross-platform tagging like del.icio.us?

Jack