I was sent this video created by Michael Wesch, Professor Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

This video makes a good (if unscientific) case for why distributed tagging models make sense — that we all ultimately contribute to making content discoverable.

Michael Wesch’s second point is that Web 2.0 is less about linking clumps of text together than it is about connecting people together (which would certainly fit almost everyone’s definition of Web 2.0).

When users create their own tags (as they do on sites like Youtube or Technorati), they contribute to a information-seeking structure that can adapt significantly quicker and better to changes in both the users’ information-seeking models, as well as those users’ information storage models.

But distributed tagging’s impact is not only felt when it comes to users ways of finding information, it also has a direct impact on what information they find.

A centrally-imposed model of tags can never take into consideration all of the possible niches that a user might want to explore, and thus is limited by the regime imposed upon that base of users.

Unleashing metadata into the hands of users and allowing them to control how and what they find is consistently gaining more traction, even with the heavy hitters of the information-seeking world like Google.