Finally, a topic I can speak with some authority on. I'm not sure that tags make that much sense as an organizing schema for a filesystem. It's just too painfu

Finally, a topic I can speak with some authority on. I'm not sure that tags make that much sense as an organizing schema for a filesystem. It's just too painful for items to not have canonical names. In my original design, a bookmark had a bunch of tags but was keyed on it's canonical URL. Maybe it makes more sense when we're only talking about a user's personal objects rather than the entire filesystem. Having a giant, flat namespace also seems wrong - Wikipedia seems especially strange in this regard, having Thingy_(Star_Wars) where Thingy is both a real thing and also present in some specific context; I frequently think it should be Star_Wars/Thingy (since it has a specific context it makes sense in and does not make sense outside of it.) Tags were mostly a way for a user to mark found things for that user's future self to potentially retrieve. They end up encoding some combination of the user's internal state and the material of the item being tagged. Different users therefore have different needs - expert users tag things differently than beginners (ie "java" vs "programming" - to a beginner there's little distinction between subtypes of programming things.) Users tend to tag much more wildly when they are not offered a reference of previously-used tags, as well. In my experience, an item that had been tagged a large number of times would have the most popular tag used 50% of the time, the second 33% of the time, and so on. This held strongly enough that much deviation from this was a sure sign of spamming. This is also where tagging falls down - tagging things for retrieval by OTHER people is almost always mis-incentivized and ands up getting spammed to hell.