Just a braindump of what I don't like about tags instead of directories, no need to repay the advantages (I agree with some of them) : - lack of identity. Some

Just a braindump of what I don't like about tags instead of directories, no need to repay the advantages (I agree with some of them) : - lack of identity. Somewhat watered down in presence of hardlinks/symlinks, but still much closer to identity than a tag cloud. - does a file without a tag exist? It is conceptually very clear how removal of the path identity causes the actual bytes to go back into the free storage pool (wiggle a bit for hardlinks, but still pretty clear), it would be quite weird however to have files stick around based solely on secondary tags like "blue". - lack of a consistent threshold for tagging: tags are binary, but relevance is not. If some files are tagged close to a full text index while others are tagged following a more minimalistic approach, the combined soup will not be very useful. - too powerful for convenience: file creation in a hierarchical filesystem usually happens with a somewhat meaningful default. PWD, an app-wide default or an app-specific last used folder. The default sets some of the information you might put into tags, and this information is easily corrected if it was wrong, with a single operation that might be as easy as dragging to a different folder. "Is the default folder the right one for this file?" is easily discerned and corrected, a default tag cloud however would require a full mental scan to check for applicability to the new file. Every attempt of making those defaults more clever would just force even more scrutiny onto the user.