WebProNews

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion (also published in WebProNews) gets it. He's telling folks to watch Flckr tags for their products and such...

"Using Flickr tags, you can assess just how much consumers are evangelizing brands by stacking them against their competitors. All you need to do is simply replace the bracketed text below with the the name of your product and enter the URL into your browser..."

Don't forget about the other popular tag-based service: del.icio.us. The same logic (except for the 1000 words) applies there too.

We don't yet know how tagging will really scale beyond the ~20,000 users of del.icio.us or the ~150,000 users of Flickr. Clay touches on this in folksonomies + controlled vocabularies. But for now, they're a pretty good way to feel the pulse of the geek and early adopter crowds.

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy's blog: Jeremy Zawodny's blog.