The whole tagging thing is interesting. I think of tagging information as bookmarks for life. I’ve been doing it for ages, but now there are plenty of tools to help me do it (not that I use them).

Tagging is a reaction to search technology, and is proportional to the use of Search as the interface to the data. If you usually search for a contact in your address book by name, you aren’t likely to do lots of tagging in the notes field. On the other hand, if you usually do a search by, say, title (”Barber”) or where the contact lives (”London”) then you might.

Just the number of ways that we mentally search for a name or number — by first name, last name, company name, city, event where we met, job title, appearance (”the bald guy who sat next to the CTO”) — is astonishing. It’s all the more astonishing that my Nokia E65 only searches contacts by first/last name or company name (but not both — depending on how the card is listed.

I’m very sensitive to the way names are spelled: once I know how someone spells their name, I rarely (if ever) get it wrong. No Mark for Marc; no Allen for Alan. The spelling is an inherent part of the way I see the name in my mind when I think of the person. There have been a few occasions where I got a spelling wrong upon introduction (my fault or the introducers), and I’ve compensated for that by spelling the name incorrectly in the contact’s notes field. So one unexpected part of tagging data is tagging it incorrectly, too, so that it can be found by people making a mistake.

All of this rambling is a long way of saying that I think there’s still a huge opportunity for improvement to the interfaces for searching content on our mobile devices.