At Many2Many, Ross Mayfield writes about tag spam at Yahoo, referring to a post by Steve Rubel. I looked but couldn’t find anything I would call spam on the list of tags for Everyone’s Pages at Yahoo, then noted a comment on Rubel’s blog from Jeremy Zawodny: “you seem a bit too willing to yell spam in a crowded tag map.” Rubel responds to Zawodny (and others with similar comments) that he sees their point, and notes that “heard from the person who posted all of these links that he is tinkering with MyWeb2.0 and by accident imported all his browser bookmarks into the larger community.” He goes on to say that this still exposes “a big hole in all of these tagging sites.” He goes on…

Chung-Man Tam at Yahoo responded to Rubel: “It looks like one of our users is really just tagging stuff the way they want, enthusiastically I might add. I might not understand that tag (nor even like it), but if they find it useful I say go ahead and tag away.”

Why can I say that? Well remember folks, My Web 2.0 is a social search engine where your community shares their insights with you. While the web can sometimes seem like the Wild Wild West, the trusted web is a place where you decide who you want to listen to. If I like the stuff that someone saves and the tags that they’re using, I’ll connect to them! If I don’t…well, you know.

Interesting point in all this about social tagging: people have different ideas about what’s signal and what’s noise, and when we start sharing our categories (and patterns of thinking, insofar as those are represented by our categorization schemes), we see… differences! As in vive la.