I'm hearing a lot about how the generation that's currently entering the workforce is going to be more supportive of knowledge management concepts than the generation going out, because the young workers will already be familiar with wikis, blogs, tagging, bookmarking, and profiling.
To support this evolution, I plead with developers to come together and adopt a standard for tagging. We've gotten to a place where users feel confident that they can use basic search language standards such as Boolean operators in most search engines; I'd like to feel the same level of confidence when tagging data online. But right now the rules vary from site to site, and if I want to get my tags right I have to remember where I am and what to do. For example, here are the tagging rules for some of the web services I use every day:
Flickr – space-separated, double quotes can be used to join words together in a single tag.
Del.icio.us – space-separated. Multiple-word tags need to be joined with a hyphen or underscore. Commas and quotes become part of the tag.
Blogger – comma-separated. Quotes become part of the tag.
I can try to keep a mental matrix of which sites use which rules ("If it's Blogger it must be commas!), but if (when) I make mistakes, it's going to affect the integrity of my tags, and by extension the integrity of others' search results.
Please, let's have a standard. I don't care which one. I just want to spend more time searching, learning, and tagging, and less time going back and re-doing all the tags that sorted to the top because they start with ".
