Tagging: Bane or Blessing?

Flickr tags have all the vitality of any folksonomy; results can be predictable, confounding as well as serendipitous. Looking for an image that expressed something profound about reading and/or libraries, I found the initial discoveries flat--lots of cherubic summer reading program participants, reading rooms and stack shots. Dispirited, I dropped libraries from the search expression: Voila, pay dirt. Two powerful images rooted out from the "reading" tag pile- one, a homeless person reading on the street (literally), and the other, two folks gazing at a Dublin Guinness factory display.

A portion of the tag list for my chosen image reads like avant garde poetry:

strangers

map

reading

light

Who would know that the words, amalgamated, mean library to me? Only one of the terms was in my search expression, but the image was in serendipitous communion with my search step. In the Salon article The Friendster of Photo Sites, Katharine Mieszkowski calls the comingling of similar images an "endlessly beguiling cross-pollination of photos that spark a host of unique communities." For me, it seemed that Flickr read what my left brain had not (yet) explicitly voiced. Is that imprecision or mystical anticipation? Was the tool muse or seer?

Something to ponder--later. Right now, I'm happy to have found my pic.