fatal flaw of tagging.

Tagging seems like a great idea - allowing individuals to create an adaptable sorting system for their information.  The main problem, and the thing that totally destroys the usability, is the existence of synonyms.

If every tagging system came with a number of pre-set tags, and then allowed the addition of tags that didn't fit into that system, there would be less of the 'tag-spread' that makes tagging useless.  Blogger has a version of this with their 'labels', a little 'show all' button that I use religiously.

I suppose I could go back through all 200 odd posts I've made here and fix the tagging, but going backwards seems against the logic of blogs.  This is a good, personalized system that would work a lot better with a bit of the limitation that the free software world is very often against.  I love crowdsourcing, but people need a path to show them where to go sometimes.