This post would cover the same doubt that I had been having for quite some time now...This doubt came to my mind as just a flash, when I was explaining to Dopppsy about the Tagging phenomenon, some 10 days back..Infact, it was exactly 10 days back.

We were discussing about the Del.icio.us site and the use of social book marking/photo sharing sites, when it occured to me that, though tagging creates a pool of like interested parties, what practical use would it be of to the participants?..I mean, by tagging a particular web page, as Technology, what is it that I am conveying?..Say for example, there is a web page explaining the technology of Google...now, I would tag this page as Technology...somebody else, might just tag it as Google...Google would be gaining, because, it gets to know, as to what people associate its page with...if there are more technology tags, then Google can understand that the page/company is associated with technology and things like that...but what do, I who tagged it as technology and the other person who tagged it as Google, gains?

I had to search through numerous tags and the bookmarks to find the same page tagged under Google- Is that adding any value to me...Is it not increasing my effort??..Is it not increasing my cost of data retreival?

Read some the more thoughts here and here. [Links via Emergic]

But it seems that the advocates of the Tagging Phenomenon, thrive on this unstructured nature of information. A case in point is the success of the search engine Technorati. If Google survives on the structured nature of the web page, Technorati survives on the unstructured content. If Google does great because, of the presence of standards in coding languages, in meta data and other such necessities, Technorati survives on the unstructured RSS feeds and the tags that people create...

A nice thesis and anti-thesis of a case- the two sides of the story...My doubts still exist!