Obviously the need for spaces in tags is an important one. Whether it’s “Semantic Web” or “Ford Interceptor” that you need to tag, it’s rather different from “Windows AND Vista” and “Ford AND Interceptor” - and it gets worse if you have a search engine that places OR in there instead of AND. Much worse. The big question is, why doesn’t such a standard already exist? It’s obvious that Web 2.0 is all about connecting ideas and bringing articles, content, and readers together. But anyone looking at the tagging process would immediately assume it’s about the exact opposite: splitting up content, making things difficult to find, and purposely making bloggers’ lives miserable.

With Habari, so far we’ve gone through all the forms, and at the moment we’re at number 3 for compatability and familiarity’s sake. But that may change - hence the need for a visible, tangible tagging standard. The only problem is, tagging isn’t some new concept. A tagging standard isn’t something that we can just whip up and serve on a platter.

What about the noun/verb argument? Look at the tags for this post: “Blogs, Blogging … Tags, Tagging” We just don’t know what people will search for - and we try to cover all the bases. But then you have so many possibilities! Code, Coding; Design, Designing; Research, Researching. For every pair there is one word more likely than the other. But people like to have all the bases covered, hence all the clutter. Tagging is fun, but only if done the right way.

This article touches on a few of the more obvious issues with implementing a tagging system properly. Tom, Rattle and I have already scoped all the places in Memestreams that use the topic system and are discussing ways to replace it with a tagging system. Believe me, it is not an easy problem!

Tagging by its very nature is more chaotic than a hierarchical topic system. Having a a good implementation is only half the battle: people must tag items well. A item that contains odd or tags that don't best describe the article is in danger of fading away. No one knows exactly what terms it could be filed under. This is where topics do very well. By imposing a controlled vocabulary, a searcher can presumably read the entire vocabulary to see all possible topic words they might be interested in.

In a nutshell, here are some big problems with tags:

-How to handle multiple words
-If/how to allow tag delimiter inside a tag
-Does letter case matter
-Punctuation and symbols
-Handling plural or singular words
-Date formating
-Multiple language support
-Colloquialisms/slang

The Need for Creating Tag Standards