Deb Richardson (aka dria) wrote a long thoughtful article on tagging at the Mozilla wiki a month and a half ago. I just noticed it now because I read that the Firefox team is considering some upgrades to the browser chrome and in the newsgroup post where some of the ideas were floated there was a reference to something called the “Places” UI. While reading up on that I found dria’s On Tagging article.

In it, she expresses a lack of interest in social bookmarking services (mainly for privacy reasons) but floats some ideas about how the browser could enable tagging, essentially as a replacement for the typical poor-scaling bookmark element we all know and fail to love.

“Bookmarks Are Dead,” she writes. “All Hail Tagging”:

My idea is that we replace bookmarks entirely with the tagging concept. Instead of bookmarking a page, subscribing to an RSS feed, blah blah, you just tag it. Tagging an item automatically stashes that URL into your profile’s tags file/database. If you’re tagging a web feed, it automatically turns it into a Live bookmark (although we need to get rid of the “bookmark” term entirely…it’s not a book).

I already have the Firefox delicious extension installed, so I’m ready for tightly integrated tagging directly in the browser interface.