Here’s a wonderful new addition to the del.icio.us process of adding a tag to a web page — the posting page predicts from your existing tags what you are typing, and offers suggestions based on your existing tags.
Not just that: below the fields are some recommended tags you have already assigned to other pages which match ‘popular tags’ assigned by others to the page being tagged (there’s probably a better way of putting it, but it’s still early here):
Just for good measure the posting page lists all your existing tags, the recommended tags highlighted in red.
Very nice. But not only nice: At a stroke this tackles a couple of perceived problems with del.icio.us: the supposed anarchy of people tagging the same pages with different tags, and the problem of you yourself ending up with too many different, but similar, tags for things that should probably have had the same tags. (There’s bound to be another side to this discussion where people would argue this ‘anarchy’ is part of the greatness of the tagging taxonomy, but I’m not going there this morning.)
Hats off to Joshua and the team. Amazing how simple and intuitive they have managed to keep del.icio.us, where it’s easy to do everything but very hard (at least for me) to explain.