Over at 37 Signals, the post that inspired Tim’s widget (see previous entry here) discusses how tagging has been implemented in any number of ways at different popular sites.

Should tags be separated by spaces? If so, then how do you indicate multiword tags (hyphens, underscores, CamelCase, quotation marks?), or should tags be separated by commas (my preference)?

When each tag box you encounter does things differently it’s hard to keep know what to do.

Tim Appnel alerted me to his release of a prototype javascript “widget for enhance tag input” called TagSuggest a few days ago. Then Typepad exploded and I wasn’t able to link to his posts. Now Typepad seems to be back, so here you go.

Tim explains a bit more of the genesis of his idea in a blog entry called On Tagging Interfaces and Usability.

The widget is seeded, apparently, with a dictionary of terms. You can try it out in situ at the TagSuggest 0.1 Sample page.