Well-written, but it ignores that the main use of tags are for individual users. I tag my photos in Flickr so that they're sortable within my photos. So Flickr.

Well-written, but it ignores that the main use of tags are for individual users. I tag my photos in Flickr so that they're sortable within my photos. So Flickr.com/unalone/tag/mike (that's not the actual URL) gets me every photo that I've taken with Mike in it. No, it doesn't help the omnipotent Mike searcher - perhaps I'm mucking data up - but it means that as I continue to photograph Mike, I get a quick pool of photos that revolve around that theme. Not everything is about creating an indexable, searchable database. If anything, I'd think that some level of user moderation for searches would be more logical than tag sorting. No - tags are best used as a more flexible version of taxonomy, for localized sorting and filing.