Practical Metadata

A good article on XML.com discussing the benefit of adding metadata tags in the content of news stories.
While, in general, I agree with the author's approach. There are some difficulties and some push back in content tagging. In fact, I have personally been in numerous briefings where content tagging was bashed as a pipe dream, overly burdensome for content creators, not worth the cost and several other criticisms. That is why I have favored a hybrid strategy where you combine an entity extractor for universal attributes and focus the content creators on more domain specific tagging.
That brings us to the difficulty of knowing what to tag. As entity extractors improve we will see them evolve beyond who, what, when and where to ontology-driven extractors that can focus on domain-specific knowledge.
I believe that with sites like del.icio.us we are seeing the public accept tagging as a natural activity and therefore the search engine vendors should be keenly aware of this and begin exploiting it to improve the precision of results. To even spur the common adoption of tagging content creation tools should do a better job of quantifying the utility of adding tagging to a user by providing some kind of statistical side panel on related documents as you add more tags. In other words, something that immediately allows the end-user to see the benefit that adding content metadata has on the ability for consumers to find their information once they publish it in the organization.