if it means that tags - and specifically those derived from open tagging (ie social tagging or folksonomy) - are here to stay, i fully agree. as to whether enterprises are beginning to understand open tagging, i’m not convinced many of them know when it’s appropriate and adds value. based on flickr, delicious, and other successful implementations, open tagging is useful when the variety of objects and concepts in the domain to be classified or categorized is open-ended, and especially when you have many or primarily non-experts doing the tagging.

in lots of cases however i hear it discussed as an alternative to a pre-defined classification scheme, but the combination of domain and users should determine which is the one to use - not fashion.

Sorry for my english, but I’m italian and probably I make a lot of mistakes.

I meant that tagging is not going to be only a fashion. As what concerns enterprise tagging I’m starting to collect a bunch of very clever and thoughful usage of folksonomies behind the firewall.

I completely agree with you that tagging (as of now at least) cannot be considered the main access layer to information inside an enterprise, but you can mix it with taxonomies and facets as we are going the show in a research project on which I’m involved. The right mix has to be the product of a complete analysis of business goals and users’ needs of course.

Good examples of this ecological approach exist already in the Internet as you probably know or can read in my previus posts.

Cheers