To tag or not to tag

I’m bored with this whole tagging thing now. Yes it’s useful. No it’s not the be all and end all. Yes it has limitations. No it’s not the only way to navigate information. Yes I will continue to use them. No I won’t be posting about it after this.

You see, to my mind at least (and therein lies a limitation) it’s very simple.

Authors (the people who write the information and understand the information they are creating) “INDEX” what they have written (indexing is an art form in itself with books devoted to this one topic). An index is hard to maintain and relies on structure and consistency.

Authors and readers tag a post/site as they desire with the hope that someone else at some point will think the way they did and find the information that way. Tagging is easy to maintain as it’s free-form and doesn’t require consistency.

In addition the site owner should implement other hierarchical systems to find the information (date or topic/category for example).

Mash them all up and you have a fairly standard methodology with the only new bit being the free-form tags. Most people will use the “index” or just search the text on the site, presuming they haven’t arrived directly at a post from a link.

Yes?

Right. Can we please put this to bed now. It’s becoming increasingly dull.