Is tagging stuck? Hardly.

The big question remains: Why is tagging stuck?

You've probably read some of the recent discussion over the stale state of tagging. The question above was posed by Philipp Keller, and I think it's interesting that it assumes tagging is stagnant. I'm in the middle of writing a book on tagging and I'm pretty sure--certain, in fact--that's not the case.

For example: LibraryThing rolls out some cool tagging-related feature every few weeks Buzzillions is doing interesting things with faceted tagging. Dozens of applications, from Etsy to Wesabe to Vista's Photogallery, are using tags in new and innovative ways. Flickr and others have been working on machine tags. IBM is looking at integrating tags with enterprise search. And there's TagsAhoy for searching all your tags across different systems at once.

That's just off the top of my head.

The increasing prevalence of tagging in software and web applications is important too. The more tagging becomes like folders--a taken-for-granted information management metaphor--the more successful it becomes. Hundreds of application developers are making tagging part of their software and by that measure tagging is wildly successful.

Anyway.

Want to know what is stuck?

Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us used to be the bellwether of tagging systems. But it hasn't added m/any interesting features recently--even obvious ones like bubbling up tags from bookmarks to the domain level. And in the meantime LibraryThing has taken over as the web app with the most tag fu.

So if Del.icio.us is your reference point for tagging you're behind the times.

I might even generalize to say that social bookmarking as a category is stuck. I think Connotea does some cool things (like DOIs), but on the tagging front it's remarkably like Del.icio.us.

And you know what? I'm not sure being stuck is really a problem. Maybe tagging in social bookmarking applications found its sweet spot early. Maybe tagging has always been about sharing and communication--as Philipp points out later in his post--as much as categorization and findability. (Del.icio.us is a collaborative link blog, and it has been since its days as an offshoot of Muxway.)

I could go on (at length), but I'll wrap up by saying:

• There are lots of interesting uses of tags if you look around. (And if you're careful not to conflate tagging and social bookmarking.)
• There's always room more innovation (Thomas makes some good suggestions in the post I linked to above) but the field is hardly stagnant.
• What the alpha geeks want from tagging is out of sync with what the market actually delivers... and that's a good thing. It's a sign that tagging is crossing the chasm.