Tom Coates’s is playing with bubbling tags up from individual songs to shows, and albums.

a more intriguing, way of aggregating tags up through a conceptual chain would be to view albums as collections of songs and artists as a collection of albums/songs.

Are there any information theories about encouraging people to tag the smallest indivisable instead of the container? (the song vs. the show in the Phonetags example) Or perhaps conversely to tag largest common demoninator? Perhaps its a lighter burden on the commons to get the handful of shows tagged, rather then each and every song? Will that always be a false normalization, one that short circuits an important cognitive process perhaps?

Because I’ve been in a couple of discussion of items inheriting tags from their containers, where the container (e.g. a playlist at H2O, a playlist at Odeo, or a SSC toolbox) are the primary objects; meaning derived from the unique combination of different items.

And while we’re bubbling tags, do we bubble tags sideways? Phonetags enriching the rumored MusicBrainz tagging project? And if so I wonder if the tags need to be qualified? I mean if syndicating tags is going to be anything more then a gimmick we need to know the source and the tagger, something like kellan@phonetags/electronic as distinct from kellan@del.icio.us/electronic, and kellan@musicbrainz/electronic?

No answers, just questions.

(ps. using David’s system, this post is pre-alpha)