We are now "tagalicious"

We're doing some cool stuff with tags, driven by Matt McAlister, who explains on his blog: "how to combine both freeform and structured tags."

David Weinberger comments (and Matt responds in an update to his original post above).

Though our experiment is in the earliest stages, we're very excited about this over here. A big thanks to Derek Butcher (our Director of Engineering) for putting the backend together. We'll see where this goes. . . .

Incidentally, Scott Rosenberg describes the internal challenge of tagging quite well in his post from January, referring to the building of the Salon Directory (back when I was at Salon, so I remember it well!). A brief snippet:

I think the issue may be less the scale of individual tags (50 billion "cat" photos!) than the scale of human enthusiasm for doing the slog-work of classification. Geeks love tidying up their personal dataspaces because, obviously, they're geeks. For the rest of the world, my hunch is that -- even when they're only classifying the tiny sliver of stuff that's their own -- most people would rather do almost anything else.