Tonight as I was reading weblogs from some of the leading hackers in the tagging communities (Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati), I found this thread of blog entries discussing frustration with the current trend toward hybridised RSS feeds from personal weblogs:

• Matt Haughey: stinky links
• Dave Shea: Information Aversion
• Tom Coates: On hybridised RSS feeds...

This thread really hit a nerve, as I recently sent mail to fellow del.icio.us hacker Chris Lott asking if he could provide separate feeds for his posts and linklog. He replied that TextPattern allows him to create a feed per category, but a feed from all the categories except the linklog was tricky.
I'm interested in all sorts of content from all sorts of sources, but I generally prefer to browse that river of content by category. So it would be nice to sort out Chris' linkblog and group it together with the others I read: waxy.org, metafilter, etc.
If only my RSS reader could recognize tags to unsplice some of these feeds: this entry is a photo, that one's a list of links, this is a recipe.
Then I started thinking: since Flickr and Del.icio.us and Technorati are encouraging everyone to tag their content, it follows that the tag-aware RSS reader will be the next step. I should be able to browse through the stream that my RSS reader has captured using the tags assigned to the individual entries. Straw, the RSS reader I use every day, allows me to categorize feeds, but currently does nothing with the metadata attached to the posts themselves.
I expect to see the leading commercial RSS readers come into tag awareness of some kind in their next release cycle. But I also expect that the first round of tagging integration will be much like Technorati's display of "aggregated" tag data from Del.icio.us and Flickr: if you click on or type a tag, you will see the most recent 15 items associated with that tag. With such limp displays of tagology, it's no wonder that so many people are saying "I don't get what's so cool about tagging".
One thing I don't like about Technorati Tags is that they're trafficking strictly in author tags (those selected by the content author). Del.icio.us, by comparison, deals entirely in reader tags. Flickr deals primarily in author tags, but allows you to tag some photos from other members. I'm not familiar enough with the Flickr mechanics to be sure, but my impression is that most of the tags in Flickr are author tags.
It seems to me that author tags aren't really all that useful by themselves, for reasons which have been discussed at length in more qualified circles. To summarize, though, Librarians and champions of the Semantic Web consider casual "folksonomic" tagging to be inferior to more structured taxonomy because inconsistent tagging decreases the semantic value. Also, semantic ambiguity leads to confusion, as the tag 'java' will be used by programmers, coffee lovers, and visitors to Indonesia to tag three completely different sets of items.
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