For example: if I’m searching Technorati for ‘David Emerson’ or ‘Canadian election’ I use the tag section of course.
But people think differently and I wind up digging anyway.
Linking one or two blogs talking about Emerson and checking back, gets me to other productive chatter about the topic.
In using the tag section (Technorati), a lot has to do with immediacy, at least for whatever I’m looking for.
It’s indexing a lot of spam, and I know they are working hard to week that out.
It’s easier to go to a search engine like Google, which is indexing quickly and gives a bigger return.

I found Tim Bednar’s explanation helpful.
Like you I’m already tired of seeing posts littered with tags and very little content.
I think getting one’s blog known is going to be harder as more come online and the rate of readers slows.
Are tags an answer? A tool, but it seems to be far less about getting bloggers to use them than search engines catching up.
I think with the services now available, it’s going to take time for the tag market to settle down a bit, and the cream to rise to the top, as it as with any technology available for the average person.

Meantime, I don’t see any point in cluttering BDBO.
I can honestly say I haven’t found blogs I’ve gone back to because of tags.
If I have key words in the headline or first graph, posts index well in places I believe matter to me as a blogger, and the readers that are interested in that particular content.

I tag my posts. Some are specific, and intended to help searchers find a particular topic - “anglican church of canada” or “down syndrome”. Other tags are very local, and perhaps make sense only to my friends.

I also get a little suspicious when I see a 75 word post with about a dozen tags at the end.

That last sentence is tagged: self reflection; conspiracy theories; vison; opthamology; math; linguistics; statistics; blogs; blogging; eschatology…