Getting better ideas with folksonomy, tagging

Businesses would get better ideas if they used social web tools and social media to engage employees, customers, and partners on a free flowing and unconstrained tagging basis instead of a pre-defined hierarchy of words that define the way things are or should be according to the business.

Dave Winer has started a discussion on Learning how to use del.icio.us that hopefully will turn into a learning experience for everyone. Del.icio.us uses tags or folksonomy to store and find information. It gives the user control over how they can tag their information so it makes sense to them. Users tag urls with their own words so they can find them later along with everyone else's who used the same tag(s).

What's tagging good for? A richer context of information? Easier to find information? Easier to describe an idea or widget? Connecting with other people. This is how you discovery business development ideas.

We find tagging useful since most of us use different words to describe the same ideas, things, and information. What's more, with new ideas, it is difficult to find words to describe what they are or do. I recently listened to a podcast of Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, and Blinks, on Human Nature, where he talks about the problems we face trying to describe something new or different. Got any hickymajigs or thingys?