Joe Lamantia.com

The Pew Inter­net & Amer­i­can Life Project just released a report on tag­ging that finds
28% of inter­net users have tagged or cat­e­go­rized con­tent online such as pho­tos, news sto­ries or
blog posts. On a typ­i­cal day online, 7% of inter­net users say they tag or cat­e­go­rize online con­tent.
The authors note “This is the first time the Project has asked about tag­ging, so it is not clear exactly how fast the trend is grow­ing.“
Wow — I’d say it’s grow­ing extremely quickly. Though I am on record as a believer in the bright future of tag clouds, I admit I’m sur­prised by these results. The fact that 7% of inter­net users tag daily is what’s most sig­nif­i­cant: it’s an indi­ca­tion of very rapid adop­tion for the prac­tice of tag­ging in many dif­fer­ent con­texts and many dif­fer­ent kinds of audi­ences, given it’s brief his­tory.
I’d guess this adop­tion rate com­pares to the rates of adop­tion for other new network-dependent or emer­gent archi­tec­tures like P2P music shar­ing or on-line music buy­ing.
You’re cor­rect if you’re think­ing there is a dif­fer­ence between tag­ging and tag clouds. And if you’ve read the report and the accom­pa­ny­ing inter­view with Dr. Wein­berger, you’ve likely real­ized that nei­ther Dr. Weinberger’s inter­view nor the report specif­i­cally addresses tag cloud usage. But remem­ber the First Prin­ci­ple of Tag Clouds: “Where there’s tags, there’s a tag cloud.” By def­i­n­i­tion, any item with an asso­ci­ated col­lec­tion of tags has a tag cloud, regard­less of whether that tag cloud is directly vis­i­ble and action­able in the user expe­ri­ence. So that 7% of inter­net users who tag daily are by default cre­at­ing and work­ing with tag clouds daily.
It might be time for tag clouds to look into get­ting some sun­glasses.