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The third and perhaps biggest problem is the overuse of tagging. How often have you seen a blog item with a list of tags almost as long as the item itself? This is a direct result of the optimism of tag authors -- they want to cover all of the bases so their content can be easily found. Thus, if "wind" is a tag, they will often include "windy", "winds", "gusty", and every other synonym and related term to ensure that the item can be found no matter what. Tag lists are often more like reading a thesaurus.

This last problem underlines the messiness of tagging and why the noise generated by tags is growing so rapidly. Any index of tags from a given set of Web or blog pages is gigantic, and each tagged item has scores of closely related tag variants with little or no syntactic distinction. In other words a big mush of text.

The result is that automated systems for finding, indexing and searching tags across multiple sites such as Del.icio.us and Technorati will continue to become less valuable, because they deal with ever greater levels of noise.

Even so, tagging will survive but it will have to evolve to retain relevance. I know that those of you who use it for your blogs and Web sites will probably not give up on tagging too soon but mark my words, in the near future you will either not be bothering with tagging or you'll have moved on to the next generation of tagging which will be more complex (probably based on XML) and demand more effort to use. Tagging will no longer be fun and easy.

On the other hand it is fun and easy to comment to backspin@gibbs.com.