It is no doubt that tagging is central to most of our Web 2.0 experience. It’s there to supposedly make our lives easier and organised on the Internet. But really, does it? Tag 1.0 started way back in 2004 when Adam Kalsey did his exploration in tagging. It’s useful, (relatively) fun, provides an additional eye candy (tag clouds) on websites. Better yet, it is a personalised organisation of content, from blogs to ANY socially-oriented sites! It is without problems.
Will there be an improved Tag 1.0? Perhaps Tag 2.0? The improvements I would expect are…
Personalised flexibility for organising categories and tags. Going through the discussions on categories vs tags from the Wordpress community is refreshing to see usage disparities. Flexibility is needed. In short, since categories can be tags, so can tags be categories. Down to basics, they are just identifiable keywords or descriptors with a purpose. To create extraordinary flexibility for the user, it’s a matter of UI, content permissions and type. The million-dollar question is, how? 
Cross-reference and clustering tags that are alike with a twist. Back in 2004, Matthew Gray looked at tag clustering when he found del.icio.us. And so it was that del.icio.us started bundle tags in mid-2005! Flickr followed similarly in providing suggestive tags. LibraryThing is also focusing on the tag system. The feature I like the most is their advance tag searching. How else can you search through all the tags that you’ve assigned to data? Another cool implementation I see is on Michael Daum’s BlogUp for TWiki. Amazing! Expect to see more of these. It’s only natural.
Automated tags on content. ZoomClouds and tagthe.net are out there for blogs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a seamless integration with ANY blogging application. Maybe AutoMeta can be tweaked for WordPress? For image tagging, research has been done. Automatic video and music tagging seems to be coming around soon too! But nothing has come to light yet, mainly perhaps because of the nature of tagging, i.e. private-based. A potential solution is Flickr’s tag clusters implementation because it’s suggestive rather than intrusive, and can benefit from such technology.
Above all, I hope there will be a defined standard before tagging becomes a huge mess for users on different systems.
Maybe we are just over-rating tags. Maybe we just haven’t found an efficient and effective way to explicate tags, in terms of usage and UI, on the Internet. Maybe TagCloud will be the 2.0.
Update: Maybe Veotag’s funding on deep tagging will boost the tagging system?
You are right in many of your points. A revisit to tag technology as well as structure and taxonomy is desperately needed. I’ll be talking about this a lot as it gets closer to release on WordPress, but I think we need to revamp the whole concept of tags and categories to really clean them up IN SEARCH SERVICES. I think we are doing it right on our blogs, though messy, but the search services which can take advantage of tagging stink. They’ve lost their value, and maybe their way.
Technorati, now, searches whole content for “tags” which are keywords not necessarily the tags for search results. Makes it no different from a search engine. And the abuse of tags must be battled. I’m sick of finding totally unrelated results in tag searches - oh, the tag is there, but it’s no different than the hidden keywords of old for spamming search engines.
A change needs to happen soon.