In Seth's post The magic word, I think the confusion he talks about is pervasive and applies to many of us outside of marketing.

Social Software and Politics by Jon Lebkowsky's is a recent post to the Extreme Democracy blog where he details some of the emerging dynamics of social software and democracy. I found a couple of his in action - one is the NYC public advocate and another is a post from businessweek . Jon's ideas on social software extend to every organization, including businesses.

How long do you wait to act responsibly before someone tells you, under harsher conditions, that what you are doing doesn't work anymore?
Seth, Where
do you get your advice?

Open tags vs. closed tags. 

1. First, let me make it clear that what he is talking about are limitations with moveable type's software. We don't have that problem since Ideascape's tagging functions can be pointed at many third party services for indexing purposes as well as serving as a way for users to find content within Ideascape.
2. Second, I know Stowe's pain over technorati, since we had to work through the technorati problem last year. Our conclusion was and still is that there are and will be many open third-party services to ping with new posts. We started out using one of the ideas Stowe suggested, having a separate line of technorati tags and another one for internal tags and all the other blog tracking engines. We support open formats and leave it to the user, one click, to decide which services to ping and which services to find and discover those AHA conversations.
3. Third, we already support rss feeds for tags, catergories, groups, blogs, etc.

The bottom line is that we are out front on the whole tagging craze and continue to experiment with filtering techniques. Here are examples of what we support today:

What's not shown on our site are the join and intersect tags function and the technorati tag line as well as how users can add new tags to an older post without reposting. If you clicked on the 'blog tracking engines' link above and read Rick's post about the other third party services, the technorati closed tag format is becoming moot and of little consequence. Besides, we have an internal bookingmarking/tagging system similar to delicious for users to tag and retag, both internal and external objects as well as several hooks into delicious to get filtered content on specific tags.