You will be able to apply tags to any item on the Amazon website and your tags will be collected under your profile. I like Alan's term for that - a taglist, like a wishlist. I can envisage Amazon adding RSS feeds later, so you can subscribe to tags and your friends' tags. For now Amazon has the whole "customers who used this tag also used..." thing going on, as a tie-in with their existing personalization features.

Here's an example page for the tag "money" - if you can't see the tags yet then Alan has some screenshots. Mike Arrington also has a screenshot and more details.

As Anil pointed out, these new tagging features point to the influence of The Robot Co-op's 43Things.com. Robot Co-op is made up of ex-Amazon folks and Amazon has a stake in the company.

Now, every feed page on Toluu will show a "Tags" tab. This tab displays all the tags other users have already attached to the feed, as well as a text box to immediately start entering tags. Toluu also suggests tags based on a user's previous behavior on the site. The experience is reminiscent of tagging bookmarks in delicious, where the Ajax interface also makes adding suggested tags as easy as clicking on the keyword.

Besides this, Toluu has gone out of its way to expose these new features in as many places as possible. When browsing through a list of feeds, for example, a little '+' sign appears next to every feed you mouse over, which then exposes an inline tagging interface.

Searching Tags

Because tags are now available on Toluu, the developers have also added the ability to search the complete index of all feeds in Toluu for a specific tag, which is a great way to discover new and interesting feeds to subscribe to.

Overall, we think Toluu did a great job in adding this new feature and making it easily accessible throughout the site. As the tagging feature is still pretty new, only a select few feeds actually have tags attached to them, but as more users start tagging feeds, this will surely become one of the most popular features on Toluu.

Nevertheless, there are also a number of benefits for event planners and group leaders. In the past the hashtag has been used to track event conversation and even field questions from an audience. Now instead of displaying a scrolling Twitter feed on a trade show screen, a group can simply pull up their Facebook page and all of the in-Facebook @ tags as well as media uploads will automatically populate the page wall. This is a great way to gather up scattered conversation and keep the momentum going for inspiring events. Look for the new feature to roll out incrementally in the next couple of weeks.

In the same way that Picasa web albums offer facial recognition and tagging, Picasa 3.5 automatically scans all of your photos and groups similar faces together. From there users can add names to their photos in bulk and upload them to their web albums. One of the interesting features of this program is that names auto-complete from a user's Google contacts. While services like Face.com offer facial recognition-based tagging on Facebook, the Picasa 3.5 desktop software allows users to organize friends and groups of friends with a simple offline hard drive scan. After a couple minutes of scanning you can create name-based collages, slideshows and geo-tagged albums. The bottom line is, if you're going to get tipsy at a bachelor party, you better hope your friends have the good sense to uncheck those photos before they start uploading your Coyote Ugly bar dance antics to the wedding slideshow.

Other new features include drag and drop geo-tagging over a Google map and simultaneous uploading and sharing. In the past, photo uploaders have had to go through the additional act of selecting specific contacts to share albums. Now users can alert their contacts to an album as it's going up. Your coworkers and family may get an eyeful. At this point, facial recognition software and batch tagging is making it tougher to put on the facade of being a respectable human being. It looks like underground speakeasys are about to see a resurgence. To download the new Picasa visit Picasa.google.com.

Today, Faviki is releasing an upgrade to their service which will give you even better control over the tagging process, making bookmarking even easier than before. They're also announcing support for OpenID.

The biggest upgrade today is Faviki's enhanced tagging interface. In the past, Faviki struggled with some of the tag suggestions pulled out of Wikipedia because they were too long and too hard to enter for practical use. Plus, users wanted to use tags of their own creation, not the tag suggestions.

For example, if someone is tagging an article about the soccer player "Filippo Inzaghi," they may want to tag it by the player's nickname "Pippo." Before, this was not possible. But now, if Faviki doesn't understand a tag, it will pull in possible matches and ask you "What exactly do you mean by ______?" After you pick your selection, Faviki will remember your choice.

This is an important change for the service because it means users can tag web pages any which way they want, but they're still linked to the structured data on the back-end. That way, when someone searches through Faviki's community tags, all the web pages for that particular item or concept will appear, even if people tagged them using their own personal keywords.

Beyond Wikipedia

Another change in Faviki's service is the ability to define new tags. Prior to today, the service was limited to searching Wikipedia for tag suggestions, but now it has the whole web at its fingertips. If a tag is entered which doesn't match anything from Wikipedia, Faviki will search Google for relevant URLs and then ask if the links presented represent the same tag. As multiple users go through this process, Faviki learns what URLs best represent that concept and adds the new tags created by the users to its database.

API, OpenID, and More

Faviki has also just launched a Save/Edit API that provides a way to save and edit bookmarks from other applications. In addition, they've introduced support for OpenID. Other new features arriving today include a smarter autocomplete list, the ability to convert tags, spam control, the ability to export/backup your bookmarks, and a new tag description tooltip.

The only issue we have with Faviki is the same one we had before: there's still no import function available. That means you'll have to leave your extensive bookmark collection behind if you want to use this service. We suppose that it could be difficult to properly tag and match all of our old bookmarks, but without this feature, Faviki doesn't have the best shot at attracting the heaviest users of social bookmarking services.

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

Is This Really Web 3.0?

Zigtag may be one of the first tools to step out of the Web 2.0 box. Where "Web 2.0" implies there is a social element to a service, it's generally speculated that Web 3.0 will bring about the intelligent web. Zigtag delivers this intelligence, but is it enough?

The only downside to Zigtag is that it requires you, the user, to manually insert the tags. In fact, it even relies on user-generated tagging and has built its entire service around that concept. That may be where Zigtag went wrong. Although two years ago, what it offered was ground-breaking and unique, as we enter 2009, we're asking the question: "Is tagging dead?"

At first, collaborative tagging, also known as a folksonomy, appeared to be the future of the web. It was a rejection of the search engine in favor of the community. It was our collective intelligence harnessed for the purpose of applying meaning and order to the pieces of the web in ways that computer-based tools could not.

As time went on, though, the one thing that made a folksonomy appealing - it was made by people! - was also the very thing that gave it problems. User-generated tags were likely to produce unreliable results. Zigtag addresses that problem, but it does not address what may end up being the true source of failure for folksonomy-based systems: people are lazy.

Now that there are myriads of services using tagging, thanks to the explosion of Web 2.0, we're getting sick of all the manual labor involved. Tag your links, tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your RSS feeds, etc.

While at one time, a semantic-based tagging system like Zigtag may have seemed like a vision of Web 3.0, we've now come to a point where we wonder if it does enough. It's possible the next revolution of the web won't be a system that understands the meaning of the tags we created, but knows how we would have tagged things if we had bothered to do so and then does it for us. And if that's not the future of the web...well...perhaps it should be.

Faviki's backend uses DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting structured info from Wikipedia and turning that into a database which you can query. (You can read our previous coverage on DBpedia here).

This means that instead of just being words, the tags in this data model become references to objects which are categorized automatically. An example from the Faviki blog cited an example using the tag "Coca-Cola." An item you tagged with this concept would actually reference the unique URL http://dbpedia.org/data/Coca-Cola (the tag is the last part of that URL). Under other tagging systems, the same item may have been tagged with cocacola, coca-cola, coca+cola, CocaCola, but in Faviki, it's simply "Coca-Cola." And because the tags structure is already emanating from the largest collection of concepts in the world - Wikipedia - their format is already standardized and agreed upon by the community.

Using Faviki

Despite Faviki's lofty goals, it's just as easy to use as any other bookmarking service. Once you sign up, you can install a browser bookmarklet which you can use to save links and tag them. You can also search your tags or click through the site's tag cloud to view some of the most popular saved links from the Faviki community.

A Search on Faviki

Unfortunately, there is no way to import your bookmark collection from another service. This is probably because doing so would necessitate completely re-tagging every link-  that would certainly require too much effort on the part of a user if it was a manual process and I imagine it's also difficult to create a service that would automatically scan each link and tag it appropriately. However, without this option, it will be hard to get users to completely switch over from whatever service they are using now.

What Problem Faviki Solves

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

There has been a lot of discussion around this topic lately. At the recent Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, predicted that over the next 10-15 years, tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web, while keywords disappear.

If that turns out to be true, then Faviki represents a big step in that direction by offering a transitional service between social bookmarking and a purely semantic-based bookmarking service that would automatically know how to tag any content saved by discovering the semantic aspects already associated with that web page.

Yes, it's similar to the "summary" area provided by most social bookmarking sites. But as we all know, that's an area that very few users take the time to complete - or they choose to fill the area with the first sentence of the content being saved. It's rarely a summary.

Synop.it is designed expressly to capture those summaries, encouraging contributors to distill the content in a way that gives the reader context for the story as a whole. And if they find a summary that doesn't do the article justice, they're encouraged to help revise it. It's like the wiki way meets social bookmarking.

As far as drawbacks go, there's no way to judge the how one "takeaway" compares to another. Without a voting mechanism or ranking, readers may struggle to find the best summaries of content. But, users can deduce some of that information based on how many times the summary has been revised - and who has done the revising. And if the service develops a following of regular users, the on-going curation of the takeaways may make this a non-issue.

As a new service, Synop.it is still sparse in terms of content. But there's a great deal of potential here for beginning to catalogue the Web in a way that directly complements the activities of millions of social bookmark contributors. More importantly, it's an opportunity for a different kind of cataloguing that - when used in combination with other types of categorizing - can provide semantic clues for us to better understand the information around us.

If you're interested in reading some of the synopses or trying your hand at distilling Web content into a short paragraph, give Synop.it a try. Getting started is as easy as registering and adding a bookmarklet to your browser.

The new Facebook Page updating feature at hellotxt, available here, lets page admins post messages, photos, or video links to the Wall of different pages. They've actually implemented this feature in a clever way that should appeal to admins who have to keep up multiple pages as they let you tag your networks and Pages with keywords. That way, when you need to update a particular set of networks, you can prepend your update with the pound sign (#) followed by the keyword in order to update just that one particular group.

Ping.fm, the newer of the two services, has also implemented Facebook Page updates and tagging. However, in their case, they don't support tagging as a workflow timesaving feature for categorizing posts, but rather as a methodology for inserting hashtags into your posts - such as what would be used on Twitter, for example. They also support "mood tagging" on networks that support it and have added in a feature for posting songs courtesy of Grooveshark.

The process of setting up your Facebook Pages on Ping.fm is a bit more involved, too. Where hellotxt simply has you add a Facebook application, Ping.fm makes you go off an get an application key which has to be copied and pasted into a box before you can access your Facebook settings. Once there, it's not even clear if they've correctly identified your page or if those settings refer to your user profile instead.

For the individual, Ping.fm will probably suffice in most cases, but it's clear that hellotxt is the service to choose if your job involves updating multiple sets of social networks or Pages.

"The addition of support for tagging and link blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a fully fledged Reader/Writer (let's call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is the first product that will tie the major pieces of the Read/Write web together - RSS/ATOM (feeds), OPML, Social-Bookmarking/Tagging (folksonomies), Attention and Microformats."

I agree that Google Reader has been adding some fantastic functionality over recent months. Indeed I now use Google Reader as my main RSS Reader - just last week I loaded it up with a bunch more OPML files and RSS feeds. Also by reading the official Google Reader blog, you can tell the engineers are passionate about building up and adding new things to the product - something sadly missing in other top online RSS Readers, some of which have stayed largely the same for 2+ years now.

It remains to be seen whether Google Reader will add more 'writer' features over 2007 - Google has to be careful the product doesn't become too geeky and experimental. You can quickly scare off people with talk of OPML and microformats (guilty!). But I think Google Reader is the most interesting online RSS Reader around right now, so if they can integrate the 'writer' functionalities into the product in a way that they're very easy to use... the RSS reading market could come alive again.

To make the process of tagging, organizing, rating, and sorting photos less work and more fun, rmbr has developed a series of games based around photosharing. This concept is called funware, and according to rmbr co-founder and CEO Gabe Zichermann, a veteran of the computer game industry, funware is already employed all over the web. Yahoo! Answers, he told me, is really just a research game, i'm in like with you is a flirting game, and so on.

Users can import photos from any popular photosharing service into rmbr. Once the photos are inside the application, users can discuss and vote on them using an interesting scale that ranges from 'sucks' to 'cute' to 'funny' to 'cool.' Users are also encouraged to play games around their photos and attempt to win points toward a site-wide competition -- Zichermann told me that eventually rmbr would like to award cash prizes to top point getters as an incentive to use the service.

The point of the site is not just about having fun and competing for points, however. While discussing, rating, and playing games based around their photos, users are actually contributing valuable semantic data to each image. rmbr has developed a number of games already, including standard favorites like "Memory," where you match photos, but one of the most intriguing games I was shown was one called "Super Photo Match." In the game, the a user selects a photo and chooses a handful of words to describe it. Friends then attempt to guess which words were used to describe the photo and whoever gets the most matches wins.

Unbeknownst to players, while having fun playing a seemingly innocuous game, rmbr is gathering the information provided to learn about your photos. Those words used to describe the image are actually tags, and if multiple players use the same word to describe a photo, it more likely to be an accurate description. The idea behind all of rmbr's games is to get users to do things like tag, organize, and rate photos without making it feel like that's what they're doing -- in other words, remove the work from photosharing.

Though rmbr can be used as a full photo storage solution, Zichermann told me that the company is really more interested in addressing the tagging/fun layer than the storage layer. They fully intend to free the organizational data that they create for users and let people export their photo data back out to the third-party storage services they already use. The company is currently working on a two-way iPhoto connector, but with online services it is a bit harder to make that possible. Zichermann told me there are a lot of great APIs that allow you to take data out of photo services, but very few people want to put data back in, so adding new tagging data back into a photosharing site, for example, is not always easy.

rmbr is currently in private alpha, but you can sing up for a slot in the beta slated to begin later this month by entering your email address on their site. What do you think about the idea of using funware make the process of tagging and organizing photos less work? Is a rmbr a service you would use? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

How it works: new users click the 'Create listing on edgeio' button and are first invited to register for an account. After that the user is taken to a WYSIWYG editor to enter their listing:

Once they've entered their details, a new blog is created. Coming soon is skinning and personalized URLs. Essentially this is a blogging platform that non-technical people will find easy to personalize. Even so, it'll be interesting to see how many people do continue to use their personal edgeio blog. The jury is out on whether this will entice more people to be bloggers.

Another new feature is that old-hand bloggers can now add their posts to Edgeio, without needing to tag them in their own blog authoring tool. Users simply enter their blog URL into edgeio's 'Get listings' textbox (on the homepage), click the button and a list of  their latest posts display. This is a useful feature for people like me, who don't bother tagging their posts - even though we know we should.

I think we'll see similar tools being created for the Structured Blogging initiative in future (nb: I'm currently re-designing the SB website). If you recall Structured Blogging supplies tools for people to create posts that have extra metadata, so that niche aggregators can automatically harvest them. For example, what if someone wanted to do a movie review - but they don't have a blog? A Structured Blogging aggregator that specializes in movie reviews could provide the same 'instant blogging' tool that edgeio provides its users, enabling non-bloggers to quickly create a movie review on their platform. Likewise the instant tagging feature that edgeio has can be applied to Structured Blogging aggregators.

When you think about it, edgeio is one of the pioneering Structured Blogging aggregators - even though they don't use SB tools or microformats such as hListings.

Why Firefox 3?

The folks at Last.fm felt that Firefox 3 offers many improvements over Firefox 2 regarding general navigation and performance, which will make it a better browser for across the board usage, music included. Specifically, though, new features like bookmark tagging and microformats could lend themselves to the development of great, next-generation music plugins.

Bookmark tagging lets you easily separate your links into categories. As with tagging on Last.fm, this could give you fine-grained control over your links, which could allow you to organize your links by music genre or type of music site.

Another new feature for Firefox 3 is native support for microformats. This functionality will be exposed to extension developers so they can take advantage of music-related microformats like hAudio and hPlaylist. Not only will this allow for new types of music plugins, but it should help spread the adoption of music (and other) microformats by publishers.

Of course, Last.fm is also likely betting on the fact that with the development of music apps for Firefox, more users will discover the Last.fm web site and services. Recently, the site launched a showcase of Last.fm apps, built using Last.fm's free tools at http://build.last.fm. This addition to the site added 19 million new users to the Last.fm user base as of January. A host of popular Firefox extensions could bring even more music fans to sign up for the service.

Currently, there are not many Firefox add-ons featuring Last.fm - a search on the add-ons site revealed only six. Meanwhile, on the build site at Last.fm, there were well over 100 apps. Developers looking for inspiration may want to consider starting there to find ideas.

The winner of the contest will be flown to the Last.fm office in London to meet the team behind the service and will attend a Last.fm/Presents live event as a guest of Last.fm. They will also receive a Logitech Squeezebox network music player.

a service that aggregates microcontent about a person (usually via RSS) and displays it on a new page/site for users to view in aggregate.

Peoplefeeds aggregates content from a variety of sources - a person's blog(s), Flickr feed, del.icio.us links and so on. They call this "personal content aggregation". Peoplefeeds also enables "discovery of other people's personal content" - and as with 43Things, users can filter that content.

Filtering by person and tags

Peoplefeeds has a nice concept called "watchlists", which allows you to subscribe to all - or just parts - of a person's content. You can filter what content you want to subscribe to - so e.g. you can choose to filter out a person's photos if you don't want to see their holiday snaps. But the real beauty of the Peoplefeeds system is that it allows you to filter content by tag. So if you're only interested in reading my content about Web Office, you can do so (provided I've tagged it as such - more on that in a moment). Here's a couple of screenshots illustrating the watchlist features:

This page shows my content that is tagged "WebOffice" across any of my sources. People can subscribe to it using the +W button (next to the RSS button).

Here's an example of Bosko's Watchlist - e.g. he's subscribed only to BlueCockatoo's content that is tagged "collaboration" and "development".

Theoretically then, it would be possible to only subscribe to a person's content on a single topic - no matter where they publish it to. For example, I post about Web Office mainly on my ZDNet blog, but occasionally on Read/WriteWeb. I may also decide to tag things in del.icio.us and Flickr with "WebOffice". So it's possible to use PeopleFeeds to filter all of those sources so you only get my content on the topic of Web Office - on one page and in one feed. 

But here's the problem - this system is reliant on the publisher correctly tagging their content. I'm one of those 'lazy taggers', so often I'll forget to tag my content. I'm also a lapsed del.icio.us user (Web 2.0 father, forgive my sins...). 

Peoplefeeds has other goodies such as OPML support and RSS feeds for nearly everything. I'm told an API is on its way too. I like how developer Bosko Milekic summed up Peoplefeeds in an email to me:

"The most important idea behind Peoplefeeds was to use personal/generated (i.e., "write") content to improve the "read" (consumption) experience, and filtering is a big part of that."

...gee I wonder why that description appealed to me ;-) All in all, Peoplefeeds is a nicely designed service with a lot of potential - particularly in the filtering aspects. I suspect it's a bit ahead of its market right now and there is a concern about whether the system is too reliant on publishers tagging their content correctly. It would be even more impressive if Peoplefeeds had some keyword-matching algorithm to identify terms like "Web Office" across my feeds, instead of relying on me (the publisher) tagging it. In other words, get the system to automate some of those tagging/filtering tasks. Let's hope that kind of functionality will come, because Peoplefeeds is something I'd like to use more.

Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer? Is it just too much work while you're zipping around the web? Who knows - what's important is that tagging web pages can still be very useful!

I stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for my own future reference wasn't enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, I've seen what some other people are doing to make it worthwhile again. Here's five and a half ways you can fall in love with tagging URLs again.

The inspiration for this post came from social media aficionado Tim Bonnemann's practice of tagging all the words he looks up online with the tag "dictionary." At the end of the year, he posted the full list of links to his blog. What a great way to deepen recall of the things you've learned!

2. Build a collaborative tag stream for a community of practice

One of the best things about tagging URLs is that all kinds of RSS feeds become available. One community of practice, a loose group of nonprofit technologists, uses the tag "nptech" to mark items of interest in del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, youtube and elsewhere. The feeds for nptech items in all of these services are then combined into one NPtech metafeed.

That makes a good community news feed, but it can be taken even further. At one point as many as 2000 people were using the tag nptech - that can be a lot of information. Consultant Beth Kanter now publishes a summary of each week's highlights from the Nptech feed over at NetSquared.

3. Create a shared items feed and put it on your web page

Many of our readers probably use the shared items feature in Google Reader. That service continues to grow more sophisticated - last week it added any shared items feeds from your Gmail contacts to your list of subscribed feeds, for example.

While that's pretty hot - there's something to be said for baking your own, too. If you tag items something like "toshare" in a service like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia then you can share URLs that you find outside of Google Reader and you can switch feed readers/tagging services without loosing all your shared items subscribers.

I did this on my personal blog this year by taking the feed from my items tagged "toshare" in del.icio.us and running it through the service FeedDigest. There I got a PHP snippet to display my links and notes on the sidebar of my blog (it's also live here in javascript on the right of this post, albeit a touch wonky with CSS). I also spliced the toshare feed together with my blog's feed (via FeedDigest) and ran the spliced feed through Feedburner. I then added a link to my sidebar offering my shared items + blog posts feed for subscription via Feedburner. Several hundred people have subscribed to get my links and knowing that someone else cares is a huge motivation to keep tagging things I find online. I open my bookmarking app to tag something "toshare" and while I've got it open I may as well give it a few other tags as well for better classification.

This winter I switched from Del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia for my social bookmarking and it was easy to replace the Del.icoi.us feed in FeedDigest with the Ma.gnolia feed. Nothing changed as far as Feedburner was concerned, it was still getting the same spliced feed URL - so all my subscribers are still getting my links.

If you're curious, by the way, the reasons I switched to Ma.gnolia include: OpenID login, a very active development team, engagement with the newest data standards like oAuth and APML, live customer support chat by Pibb IM (also with OpenID, RSS) and a couple of other very cool features. The user community there is quite impressive, too.

4. Tag into a mobile reader

In addition to tagging things "toshare" I've also taken recently to tagging items "toread" and pulling that feed into Netvibes. Netvibes has a great that's good for checking a small number of feeds in between full-reader sessions.

Adding my toread tag to Netvibes has made it easy for me to catch up on things I want to read while traveling around town. Sometimes I'll just read the most widely popular items from my toread feed, by running that feed through AideRSS and getting a new feed of the 20% of those items that were most tagged, Dugg, commented on and linked to. AideRSS can be applied on top of all of the methods on this list.

It's another way that I'm incentivized to open up that tagging interface more than I would be if I was only saving things for posterity. Now a searchable archive of key pages is available as a secondary consequence of tagging things toread and toshare.

5. Tag your microblog posts

If you think opening up del.icio.us to save something is more trouble than it's often worth, then I'm sure you'll agree that it can feel really overwhelming to compose an entire blog post! (I wrote about this once and got linked to by the BBC, whereupon I was promptly called a loser by snarky British readers for even bringing up the dilemma. "Blogging," one said, "is like wearing a coat that says I am Billy No Mates." That's the funniest insult I think I've ever received.)

ANYWAY, I know I'm not alone in finding it much easier to share information over Twitter than by blogging or tagging in a social bookmarking app. Enter Hashtags. Like tagging for Twitter, hashtags are terms you put after a # in a post. Hashtags.org then aggregates all the tweets using a given tag and publishes an RSS feed. Reading a feed of short messages sent from the #sandiegofires was very interesting, for example.

Though you can certainly just subscribe to a search feed through a service like Terraminds - Hashtags let you do all the things in microblogging that you can do using the methods described in numbers 1 through 4 above. See also Dave Sifry's new project Hoosgot - a service he calls the Lazyweb for the age of Twitter.

5 1/2 The future

In a future that leverage our Attention Data, we'll be able to tag things in order to influence our Attention Profiles. What does that mean? It means that once you've exposed your Ma.gnolia APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) to your Bloglines RSS reader - then you'll be able to influence the feeds that Bloglines recommends to you by tagging certain things in Ma.gnolia.

Perhaps you discover that you love reading African photoblogs but you don't know much about the field. Tag a few that you discover in Ma.gnolia and the next time you open up Bloglines it will notice that you've expressed a new interest and recommend some of the top African photoblogs in its giant feed database.

That future isn't terribly far off, in fact. Ma.gnolia already publishes a rudimentary APML file for each user and Bloglines has announced that it will support APML soon.

Conclusion

So tagging hasn't taken off like early fans thought it would - but it's still really useful. If we explore ways that it can provide tangible, short-term, personal value then we can score the long term, aggregate value as a result. I wish it weren't that way - but that's how I've found value in the practice myself.

So let's tag some terms we have to look up the definitions for this year! Please let readers here know about any other super cool tagging practices you've experimented with.