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This evening’s SearchSIG featured a panel discussion on tagging and social bookmarking.

L-R: Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us), Kevin Rose (Digg), Michael Tanne (Wink), Manish Chandra (Kaboodle)

Charlene Li (from Forrester) moderated.

The room at Yahoo was full — standing room only. A quick show of hands indicated nearly everyone in the room had used tagging services before.

Some discussion about “how can we trust the tags”, tag spam (Charlene’s term was “spag”), discerning intent from user tagging and other actions, and the problems of tagging users and the range of social gestures built into the various systems.

Joshua used the example of receiving LinkedIn connection requests from someone whose name you don’t recognize. You don’t want to accept it, because you don’t know who it is. You don’t want to reject it, because it would be rude, and you might actually know them. So he has a huge backlog of random connection requests piling up in his inbox.

Someone in the audience commented that between keyworded search and tagging, people are starting to lose grammar, and instead come up with “restaurant san francisco cool” instead of complete sentences.

Participation rates: Wink assumed 5-8% of their users would tag, actual is 30-40% active (but they’re just launching and are picking up a lot of knowledgeable early adopters from word of mouth). Digg has around 20% of their traffic from registered users (they don’t exactly tag, just digg). Kevin says Digg has around 140K registered users, generating around 4M pageviews per day.

Charlene wrapped up the Q&A with some predictions for the upcoming year:
1. The rise of some sort of social link and social standing system to “rate” users
2. Some sort of social “disaster” will occur on one of the new services, despite best efforts to prevent social disease from creeping in.
3. Today’s companies are mostly small, smart, startups. In a year there will be a different cast of characters from mainstream media, search engines, bigger players.

Thanks to Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure for organizing another great session.