The creator of Bloglines, Mark Fletcher writes..
I was going to blog something about how tags are bad, evil horrible bad, and highlight the failure of existing search technology, but I couldn’t muster the energy. High level message: tags suck and are unnecessary except in cases where no other textual data exists (like photos, audio or video).
I’m a huge fan of Bloglines and really appreciate the convenience it provides, but this just sucks. I really hoped to see Bloglines implement a tagging system and now it’s pretty obvious that it won’t happen in the near future, or maybe never at all. From my point of view, tags are incredibly useful. Their use might highlight the failure of existing search technology, but right now, they serve the purpose.
Tags allow us to make use of the innate ability of the human mind to make connections where none might be obvious to the most sophisticated algorithms. They also extend a layer of personalization without much effort because it is the user who tags objects in a way that need not be clear to anybody else. I might give a link, blog post or photo a tag that nobody else can relate to, but holds a special meaning to me. For example, I might tag a friend’s blog post about the Himalayas as a place I’d like to visit, while someone else might interested in it from the perspective of a geologist and give it a tag to reflect that. Wouldn’t it be easier to get back to that post using tags rather than searching for it and then wading through the clutter? By using more than one tag the process becomes even easier.
If Bloglines had provided me with the ability to tag my posts, I wouldn’t have had to use del.icio.us to bookmark interesting blog posts. And by letting users tag posts they find useful, Bloglines could definitely improve their recommendation engine which doesn’t seem to work.