Practical Semantic Web - Tagging and Tag Clouds

In this paper we research the incentives, state-of-the-art, and trends in a recently appeared social activity of tagging and creating tag clouds. We explain how this process works in practice and how it implicitly builds mutual understandable semi-formal semantics of many terms, artifacts and human activities. Although at the moment the results of the tagging are only intended to be used by humans its widespread adoption make it potential building block that may fill the gap between formal semantic web research, with its formalized ontologies and the practical semantic needs of the majority of lay-minded people.