Without reading the whole Hype Cycle in detail, I have two thoughts: First, this is an emerging technologies and collaboration Hype Cycle. Gartner may track tagging in the metadata / taxonomy category.

Second, I think the lack of commercialization around tagging affects the way that Gartner regards the whole subject. Gartner sells it’s analysis to lots of customers thinking of spending money on technology. If it doesn’t cost money, the perceived risks of the technology are lower, and the big analysis firms pay less attention, because their customers see less need to pay for analysis. If there’s no market, they’re smart enough not to create product that won’t sell.

However, as this blog mentions in my most recent post, tagging is entering the phase of commercial innovation – where would-be sellers invest money and time in an effort to create products or services for sale to customers.

As I’m not an enterprise IT buyer, I think we’ll simply have to wait and see how well these attempts to ‘productize’ tagging work out.

Tagging isn’t part of this list – I suppose because it is too small in comparison with the things mentioned in this list.

But Joe, can you explain why Tagging shouldn’t be in this list when RSS, Blogging and Wikis are part of that list?

Thanks a lot for the insightful feedback to my blog post.

I must confess that I’m not into enterprise at all so I just stumbled over that explanation of hype cycles, thought: “Oh, this applies amazingly well to the tag history as I experienced it” and that was it. So thank you for making things clear.

I agree with you that tagging is not this kind of “first order technology”. The whole “web 2.0″ thing probably applies better (or are there other good examples of technologies that apply to those hype cycles?)

But then, I still think the “Hype cycle” describes quite well what happened to tagging. Or do you say that tagging is still hyped? You say “I’ll revisit the current activity around tagging at a later date”. I’d love to hear that. I’d love to hear some new innovation going on. Am I just missing it or is there not much around?

I agree with Joe that Phillip Keller is applying the ‘Hype Cycle’ inappropriately in this case. The most obvious reason is of course that ‘tags’ are not a ‘technology’, if anything they are more like a communication medium. They communicate human interest or intent.

However, tags are at the moment, many things to many people, but really the current form of ‘tag’ to which this blog refers, had its genesis as the ‘html-tag’ back at the beginning of the web in the early 1990’s.

Lots of people learned html and started to understand that an html-tag could point to anything. So, Keller’s Tagging Hype Cycle mis-identifies tagging as a technology and also mistakes the start of the phenomenon.

One quibble. You write: “Tagging does not seek to displace existing technologies or entrenched vendors” but are there not automated taxonomy generating tools that might be disrupted by the widespread adoption of tagging?

More broadly, isn’t tagging something of a threat to top-down ontology and taxonomy approaches?

Great to see some chatter here to dispell the “trough” idea.