Tagging seems to be as much of a "HOT" thing in the web world right now as Web 2.0. I know we are doing a lot of thinking about tagging here at work - especially in the context of nailing down a standard for collecting, presenting and managing tags. Hopefully some patters to emerge soon.

This post from Gino Zahnd got me thinking a bit about what is happening with tags here on Yahoo!

There is the conceptual and traditional view of tags - for the users, by the users.

Even though we have seen in research that normal people don't really understand the term — they do understand the concept and the value. When changed to be called Topics, it all seems to click.

What is happening in Yahoo! Tech though, is a reappropriation of the presentation of a tag cloud based on users interest of topics and not a presentation of terms that in and of themselves meaningful for findability to users.

I am not sure I personally agree with this implementation, but I do understand the concepts and the desire for creeative exploration of ways to enable people to find the MOST interesting stuff on the web.

I think it will be quite interesting to see how tags play out in the long run as they becomes more ubiquitous and more understood by the everyday person.

Will we see sites take the bottom up approach of having users tag content of interest and then map that or intersct that to the traditional IA controlled vocabulary or taxonomy? This is a wild wild west time for this and a lot of rules will be broken while it is being figured out.