Tagging has been the subject of much discussion over the last several years, including many IA Summit presentations. But recent trends show that tagging is evolving quickly, and that today's conventional wisdom might not be accurate for long.

This session will explore five counterintuitive tagging trends that provide a glimpse into the next generation of user-generated classification.

The five trends are:

• The market wants structure. The next wave of tagging systems impose more structure and accept less ambiguity in tags.
• A pace for all layers. Pace layering suggests that tags are a fast-moving form of metadata, while facets and taxonomies are more stable, slower layers. But recent research and practice suggest that tagging patterns are often quite stable, and that tagging systems can operate across multiple pace layers.
• Automanual folksonomies. While most folksonomies are generated by analyzing statistical patterns in tags, new approaches mix manual and automatic approaches to yield better results.
• Communities matter. Some people have suggested that tagging works best when it's done for personal reasons. But it appears that the community around a tagging system is a major contributor to its health and success. Active communities like the one at LibraryThing can help create robust and useful tag sets.
• User-generated innovation. Where tags are implemented alongside data feeds a remarkable pattern of user-generated innovation occurs. Tags and feeds create a simple read-write system for any web application, allowing users to freely hack new features and extend the application. While this isn't news exactly, the consistency of this pattern across significantly different tagging systems suggests that it's important.