Tags, folksonomies, meta-data and people's lazyness, utility and fun 
Marc Canter, who's one of the strongest promoters of structured blogging, in response to Dave Winer's comments admits that "Nobody wants to attach tags, categorize, define their posts as something specific or even THINK about what they're doing - first. It's a "shoot from the hip" socieity". But Marc is sure we need tags, folksonomies and meta-data.
The cornerstone of the discussion seems to be people's lazyness on one side and possible automation on the other. I am for the automation. I think most people wouldn't care to attach meta-data to posts just like (or even more than) they don't tag posts. But are we sure people don't tag posts just because they're lazy? I'm not lazy and I don't tag posts. Dave doesn't tag anything and Marc says about him "well this is not a man anyone would call lazy".
The reason must be elsewhere. As I said I'm not lazy and as an evidence of that I tag very carefully my del.icio.us posts. I do that because the better I do that the easier will be to find out old bookmarks and having fast and simple access to pages I bookmarked months ago is key to my productivity. That must be the reason, then: self-utility. I tag because it's useful to me, I probably wouldn't if it were only for the social value of del.icio.us tags. The beauty of it is that through my personal utility, my posts create social value when the tags are mixed with all other del.icio.us users. Automation.
There must be more anyway. People don't only do what's useful for them. People also do what's simply fun. Ask yourself why most people blog. Is that for the utility of the information they add to the world? Or for their personal utility? Hmmm, I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong here but I think most people blog because it's fun, they simply enjoy doing that. I don't have fun posting to del.icio.us, it even bothers me sometimes, but I do that for my utility so I'm ready to pay the price. On the other hand I blog for fun and I want to enjoy all the time I spend doing that: tagging is no fun for me and has no personal utility. (In addition, I don't think it's socially useful without a general agreement on how to tag but that's another story). Attaching meta-data to posts wouldn't be either, except when I'll start a blog to cover a very specific topic. Even more, choosing a title for my posts is something I don't always want to do, and that's why I use the OPML editor to blog simple, single-paragraph posts or links as they come.
I'm ready to admit that many bloggers out there are not...as socially lazy and selfish as I am and they would be happy to spend time tagging and attaching meta-data but are they statistically significant? My suggestion to anybody working on web publishing tools: try to create things that give users fun and/or personal utility. Start from that and do (automation, automation) what you can to classify the information that comes out. Dreaming of a world where everybody wants to go the hardest way just because they're being semantically correct will simply let you down.
