Yesterday I was checking out the beta of Technorati and it got me thinking about the role of tagging in a content management system and/or blog engine. It seems like it would be a very useful feature to include for allowing authors to assign relevant categories that could be used in numerous ways within the application. If tagging became a part of all the interactions within the engine it could lead to a system that could provide developers with a very interesting way to pull out all sorts of interesting information from the system that would otherwise have to be explicitly coded in.
For blogging systems I love the idea that Technorati has implemented in their beta. If you do a tag search for something like “Star Wars” they load the 3 most recent posts tagged “Star Wars”, the top 20 posts for the keyword match. They also show a list of photos from Flickr that match the tag as well as links from Furl and delicious that have the same tag. Interesting stuff.
From a content management perspective it seems like tagging could be a valuable feature to implement into the core of a system. One of the things that I often run into within CMS systems is the inability to setup relationships and links between “items” in the system. By making tagging a core concept within a content management system you could open up a lot of possibilities when it comes to building interesting relationships among content items within the system.
Tagging seems to be showing up all over the web lately, is tagging within content management systems the next logical step?