If you’re looking for examples of how social tagging can provide real value, take a look at the Gnomedex2005 tag at Technorati. Attendees of Chris Pirillo’s recently-concluded tech conference agreed to tag their blog posts about the session making it easy for anyone to keep track of all the various posts just by searching the tag at Technorati. While this group tagging concept isn’t exactly new, its use at a high-profile event like Gnomedex helps make one of tagging’s uses clear.

At the IABC conference, which I’m at right now, incoming chairman Warren Bickford has recruited a dozen attendees to blog the conference on the IABC Cafe blog. That’s great, but why not blog about the conference on our own blogs and give each post the tag IABC05? I’ll start. My first post about the conference will use this tag. Let’s see if anybody else follows suit.

UPDATE: I learned this morning that IABC has a tag for the conference—just not a well-publicized one. It’s also somewhat cumbersome: iabc-international-conference-2005. But all we have to do is create the tag once and paste it into our blog posts and we’re good to go. Here’s the code (just look at the page source to get the full code:

Tag: IABC International Conference 2005