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There's been a lot of fuss recently about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service with its notion of harnessing the "wisdom of crowds" to solve problems, and this tagging business is a closely related phenomenon.

It, too, delegates and distributes the task of recognition and classification to millions of individual human document creators

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rather than trying to find an algorithmic solution that a computer can execute: that's both a welcome acceptance of the limits of computability and a sensible allocation of resources. What we need is a much better tagging user interface for all documents.

You can tag Office documents at creation time inside the relevant application, and add titles and comments later in Explorer by using the Summary tab under Properties. But most users don't know this tab exists, it's a pain to bring up and unlikely to be used, and it doesn't present your own tags to avoid misspelling. A few years back, Microsoft failed to establish Internet Explorer as our "interface to everything", but I wouldn't mind a Google Mail-style interface to everything that makes filtering and tagging so easy you'd be mad not to. Google kept muttering about doing an operating system a few years back, but it's gone all quiet recently. Good omen or bad?