January 24, 2005: Thomas Vander Wal's Folksonomy Explanations throws some good glosses on the "folksonomy space", but I have to question the conclusion: "Tags will be the step to the next generation of personal information managment." IMHO, tags are a hideous way to manage personal information. They do make sense to me for non-textual information (photos, for example), but for email? Blecch... I spend way too much time dealing with each email as it is, and why should I have to tag them when they already have all the damn data they should need (who sent the message, what were we talking about, what other things were we talking about around the same time, how long, was there a URL embedded, etc.). I'm not saying email's working as it is, but shucks, I certainly don't want to have to tag my messages. Can't, like, a computer do that for me?