Sifry’s Alerts: Technorati Launches Tags This is a thorough explanation from the founder and CEO of Technorati. He also quotes Clay Shirky, who I will quote again here:
This is something the well-designed metadata crowd has never understood just because its better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture.
Found this post via: http://www.promotetheprogress.com/ a legal blog on IP from J. Matthew Buchanan