Tag maintenance

Clay Shirky blogs about the Dynamic growth of Tag Clouds. He put together a script that showed how the cloud of tags associated to a URL on del.icio.us grows over time.

An interesting aspect (mentioned later in his post) is that some of the top tags for a resource only percolate to the top later in the tagging process. The example he uses is the tag "ajax" being applied to the "original Adaptive Path article". The "ajax" tag wasn't used until after more than 1/3 of taggers had already tagged the resource.

This begs the questions: how can users who are unaware of a certain term ever going to use that term as a tag; and how will that term ever be added to the list of tags used by those who have already tagged the resource?

To be clear: I tagged the original article. I did not however use the tag "ajax" since at the time the term meant nothing to me. It had not yet caught on as a global term for the practice of using javascript to communicate with a server behind the scenes. Today, I might very well attempt to find that article using the "ajax" tag. Of course, this wouldn't work since I never used that tag. It would be nice if I could search my tagged resources using others' tags when I don't have the tag I'm searching for. Obviously my own tags should have priority but if I search my resources for the "ajax" tag, the resources that I have tagged and that others have tagged as "ajax" should show up in my search.

This points to a general maintenance problem with tagging (and I would venture to guess with classification schemes overall): how is the metadata maintained cheaply. Currently, tagging a resource into del.icio.us takes me less than 30 seconds. It would be a real pain if I had to review my resources all the time and add new tags.

Maybe another solution (other than the one listed above) would be to produce a feed of resources that I have tagged and an interface that would guess which tags from others would be most useful to me.

It feels like we are moving beyond tagging to searching. So is the issue the technology behind tagging/classification or behind searching?