Here’s an idea: what if when I wrote weblog entries about General Motors, I included a special tag, a keyword tag, that let everyone who wanted to read blog entries about General Motors read my weblog article, without otherwise having to subscribe to my blog? Makes sense. Now, should it be “gm” or “GM” or “generalmotors” or “general motors” or “General Motors” or “GM Corporation” or … ?

Therein lies the fundamental problem with Technorati Tags, as promoted by the popular weblog search system and utilized by a small percentage of bloggers.

Librarians are very familiar with this problem, though at a library it shows up as the “keyword problem”: having keywords assigned to a particular book can be very helpful as long as you agree on the subset of all words that comprise the entire keyword dictionary. Stultifying though the standards may seem, having a “use the formal company name that appears on their annual SEC filings” or “search the tags database before creating a new tag” rules do alleviate some of this trouble. But not all of it.

Instead, Technorati advertises that …

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