[Clay Shirky][1] was the first to [come up][2] with the idea of “augmented tags”.

During the last 3 weeks I kept pondering about the tag molecule idea and ended up disagreeing with most of my previous post about it. The core idea was to enrich every tag with an explicit declaration of a “dictionary authority”, i.e a third party tag space. That would improve the semantic of the tag assigned by an author and the effectiveness of tag queries.

Besides the problem of consistently coding all the components of the tag molecules both in the HTML page and in the RSS feed, I was struck by my own example about the Ferrari owner. To set up that example, I had an hard time trying to find a good tag space focused on the automotive sector. No tools are available today for searching among tag spaces. Moving quite randomly I found the autoblog.nl, but to be honest I was partially satisfied because of the language: how possibly can our english speaking Ferrrari owner perform a search in the english blogosphere choosing a dutch dictionary?

Tag spaces are the results of the collective tagging efforts of individuals (the tag spaces of weblog) or groups (e.g. the del.icio.us tag space). Some of them are very large and fast evolving, others are small and focused, etc. But which is the right one to refer to for every one of my searching or tagging needs? I’m afraid that this approach could be theoretically sound but actually impractical …