Tags go mainstream - great news for taxonomy

Apple announced the release of the latest Mac operating system today - Mavericks.

usually, this news would not cause a ripple in the taxonomy world but one new feature that the operating system includes is Tags. Apple has switched to a tag based approach to help users organize and find documents on their computer. 

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html#tags

This marks one of the first formal endorsements of a tagging and taxonomy approach to organizing information as opposed to nested folder structures. 

Consumers will likely come up with their own tags organically as they save files.  However, creating an enterprise Taxonomy is a way for an organization to bring a common language and a common vocabulary to employees so that everybody is tagging with a normalized set of terms. 

Taxonomy and tagging has been the future for organizing information; today's announcement from Apple is a clear sign that taxonomy and tagging is finally coming into its own.