The “Tagging” book by Gene Smith is out. I am still awaiting a paper copy, but had a chance to look at the online version already. It looks really comprehensive, concise and covering all important tagging concepts. Which is not easy for such a moving target topic.

If you’re an information architect, user experience designer, web designer, product manager or developer it will tell you everything you need to know to design a tagging system. It covers tagging from broad concepts right down to the specifics of interface design and even code. It also deals with issues of social web design, like popularity, social discovery and recommendations, that are germane to tagging. Finally, I tried to touch on some of the broader social trends—like emergence of a ubiquitous, always-on information environment—to which tagging is connected.

There isn’t a large body of research around tagging and there is no widely accepted “tagging theory,” and that made planning and organizing material quite difficult. Much of the conventional wisdom, if you can call it that, around tagging is being challenged by new (and actually quite fascinating) applications of the basic tagging techniques. Librarything, Wesabe, PhotoShelter, Buzzillions are all pushing the envelope of social metadata. This is great, but it made writing the book (and also, feeling confident about the material in the book) harder than it might otherwise be.