Darren Barefoot has said what I wish I had.

I’m a big Technorati fan, it’s been a terrific service and I use it daily.

However, this tag thing is a bit much. Most of us don’t use them, it’s extra work, and they are annoying and unattractive and ridiculously self important stuck at the bottom of posts. Most blogs are already too cluttered, it’s another distraction. And I’ve read they don’t work.

As most bloggers know, it’s becoming increasingly de rigeur to describe each blog entry with Technorati tags. As the site itself explains, think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense.  For example, I might have tagged the previous entry like this:

Technorati Tags: video, neworleans, hurricane, katrina, rocketboom, cnn, stephentaylor

In theory, they’re a means to describe your own content. More practically, though, they’re a way of increasing traffic from tag-savvy visitors. And you know what?

They suck.

Why do I need words to describe the words I’ve already written? Why must I artificially categorize my text content? I’ll tell you why. Technology has failed us. It’s 2005, and we still don’t have software that can read the previous entry and say something like,This is a short, critical account of two video clips. One is from an independent vlog called Rocketboom, while the other is from CNN. Darren likes them both, admiring the first one?s courage and the second one’s journalistic integrity. [more]

Instead, we’ve got the Cro-Magnon shotgun of tags. We’ve got nouns trotting across our page like a first-year’s bad found poem. We’ve got a technology wide, wide open to tag spam, and one that rewards the tag-friendly early adopters instead of the insightful, analytical and creative.

So, guys from Technorati (and the rest of you as well), you’re trying to solve the wrong problem with your new blog finder. Go off and teach your computers how to read. Teach them how to understand what I’ve written without my having to get all post-modern.

Barefoot is looking for candidates from the Liberal and Green parties that are blogging. If you know of any head over and let him know. He has found 19 Conservative candidate blogs and 16 NDP.